Re: [PATCH] mm: cache largest vma

[Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com>]

On Mon, 2013-11-11 at 13:01 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Ingo,
> > 
> > On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 08:36 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > > * Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I will look into doing the vma cache per thread instead of mm (I hadn't 
> > > > really looked at the problem like this) as well as Ingo's suggestion on 
> > > > the weighted LRU approach. However, having seen that we can cheaply and 
> > > > easily reach around ~70% hit rate in a lot of workloads, makes me wonder 
> > > > how good is good enough?
> > > 
> > > So I think it all really depends on the hit/miss cost difference. It makes 
> > > little sense to add a more complex scheme if it washes out most of the 
> > > benefits!
> > > 
> > > Also note the historic context: the _original_ mmap_cache, that I 
> > > implemented 16 years ago, was a front-line cache to a linear list walk 
> > > over all vmas (!).
> > > 
> > > This is the relevant 2.1.37pre1 code in include/linux/mm.h:
> > > 
> > > /* Look up the first VMA which satisfies  addr < vm_end,  NULL if none. */
> > > static inline struct vm_area_struct * find_vma(struct mm_struct * mm, unsigned long addr)
> > > {
> > >         struct vm_area_struct *vma = NULL;
> > > 
> > >         if (mm) {
> > >                 /* Check the cache first. */
> > >                 vma = mm->mmap_cache;
> > >                 if(!vma || (vma->vm_end <= addr) || (vma->vm_start > addr)) {
> > >                         vma = mm->mmap;
> > >                         while(vma && vma->vm_end <= addr)
> > >                                 vma = vma->vm_next;
> > >                         mm->mmap_cache = vma;
> > >                 }
> > >         }
> > >         return vma;
> > > }
> > > 
> > > See that vma->vm_next iteration? It was awful - but back then most of us 
> > > had at most a couple of megs of RAM with just a few vmas. No RAM, no SMP, 
> > > no worries - the mm was really simple back then.
> > > 
> > > Today we have the vma rbtree, which is self-balancing and a lot faster 
> > > than your typical linear list walk search ;-)
> > > 
> > > So I'd _really_ suggest to first examine the assumptions behind the cache, 
> > > it being named 'cache' and it having a hit rate does in itself not 
> > > guarantee that it gives us any worthwile cost savings when put in front of 
> > > an rbtree ...
> > 
> > So having mmap_cache around, in whatever form, is an important
> > optimization for find_vma() - even to this day. It can save us at least
> > 50% cycles that correspond to this function. [...]
> 
> I'm glad it still helps! :-)
> 
> > [...] I ran a variety of mmap_cache alternatives over two workloads that 
> > are heavy on page faults (as opposed to Java based ones I had tried 
> > previously, which really don't trigger enough for it to be worthwhile).  
> > So we now have a comparison of 5 different caching schemes -- note that 
> > the 4 element hash table is quite similar to two elements, with a hash 
> > function of (addr % hash_size).
> > 
> > 1) Kernel build
> > +------------------------+----------+------------------+---------+
> > |    mmap_cache type     | hit-rate | cycles (billion) | stddev  |
> > +------------------------+----------+------------------+---------+
> > | no mmap_cache          | -        | 15.85            | 0.10066 |
> > | current mmap_cache     | 72.32%   | 11.03            | 0.01155 |
> > | mmap_cache+largest VMA | 84.55%   |  9.91            | 0.01414 |
> > | 4 element hash table   | 78.38%   | 10.52            | 0.01155 |
> > | per-thread mmap_cache  | 78.84%   | 10.69            | 0.01325 |
> > +------------------------+----------+------------------+---------+
> > 
> > In this particular workload the proposed patch benefits the most and 
> > current alternatives, while they do help some, aren't really worth 
> > bothering with as the current implementation already does a nice enough 
> > job.
> 
> Interesting.
> 
> > 2) Oracle Data mining (4K pages)
> > +------------------------+----------+------------------+---------+
> > |    mmap_cache type     | hit-rate | cycles (billion) | stddev  |
> > +------------------------+----------+------------------+---------+
> > | no mmap_cache          | -        | 63.35            | 0.20207 |
> > | current mmap_cache     | 65.66%   | 19.55            | 0.35019 |
> > | mmap_cache+largest VMA | 71.53%   | 15.84            | 0.26764 |
> > | 4 element hash table   | 70.75%   | 15.90            | 0.25586 |
> > | per-thread mmap_cache  | 86.42%   | 11.57            | 0.29462 |
> > +------------------------+----------+------------------+---------+
> > 
> > This workload sure makes the point of how much we can benefit of caching 
> > the vma, otherwise find_vma() can cost more than 220% extra cycles. We 
> > clearly win here by having a per-thread cache instead of per address 
> > space. I also tried the same workload with 2Mb hugepages and the results 
> > are much more closer to the kernel build, but with the per-thread vma 
> > still winning over the rest of the alternatives.
> 
> That's also very interesting, and it's exactly the kind of data we need to 
> judge such matters. Kernel builds and DB loads are two very different, yet 
> important workloads, so if we improve both cases then the probability that 
> we improve all other workloads as well increases substantially.
> 
> Do you have any data on the number of find_vma() calls performed in these 
> two cases, so that we can know the per function call average cost?
> 

For the kernel build we get around 140 million calls to find_vma(), and
for Oracle around 27 million. So the function ends up costing
significantly more for the DB workload.

Thanks,
Davidlohr

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