Re: regression caused by cgroups optimization in 3.17-rc2

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>]

[Sorry to reply so late]

On Tue 02-09-14 13:57:22, Dave Hansen wrote:
> I, of course, forgot to include the most important detail.  This appears
> to be pretty run-of-the-mill spinlock contention in the resource counter
> code.  Nearly 80% of the CPU is spent spinning in the charge or uncharge
> paths in the kernel.  It is apparently spinning on res_counter->lock in
> both the charge and uncharge paths.
> 
> It already does _some_ batching here on the free side, but that
> apparently breaks down after ~40 threads.
> 
> It's a no-brainer since the patch in question removed an optimization
> skipping the charging, and now we're seeing overhead from the charging.
> 
> Here's the first entry from perf top:
> 
>     80.18%    80.18%  [kernel]               [k] _raw_spin_lock
>                   |
>                   --- _raw_spin_lock
>                      |
>                      |--66.59%-- res_counter_uncharge_until
>                      |          res_counter_uncharge
>                      |          uncharge_batch
>                      |          uncharge_list
>                      |          mem_cgroup_uncharge_list
>                      |          release_pages
>                      |          free_pages_and_swap_cache

Ouch. free_pages_and_swap_cache completely kills the uncharge batching
because it reduces it to PAGEVEC_SIZE batches.

I think we really do not need PAGEVEC_SIZE batching anymore. We are
already batching on tlb_gather layer. That one is limited so I think
the below should be safe but I have to think about this some more. There
is a risk of prolonged lru_lock wait times but the number of pages is
limited to 10k and the heavy work is done outside of the lock. If this
is really a problem then we can tear LRU part and the actual
freeing/uncharging into a separate functions in this path.

Could you test with this half baked patch, please? I didn't get to test
it myself unfortunately.
---
diff --git a/mm/swap_state.c b/mm/swap_state.c
index ef1f39139b71..154444918685 100644
--- a/mm/swap_state.c
+++ b/mm/swap_state.c
@@ -265,18 +265,12 @@ void free_page_and_swap_cache(struct page *page)
 void free_pages_and_swap_cache(struct page **pages, int nr)
 {
 	struct page **pagep = pages;
+	int i;
 
 	lru_add_drain();
-	while (nr) {
-		int todo = min(nr, PAGEVEC_SIZE);
-		int i;
-
-		for (i = 0; i < todo; i++)
-			free_swap_cache(pagep[i]);
-		release_pages(pagep, todo, false);
-		pagep += todo;
-		nr -= todo;
-	}
+	for (i = 0; i < nr; i++)
+		free_swap_cache(pagep[i]);
+	release_pages(pagep, nr, false);
 }
 
 /*
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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