Re: [PATCH 0/9 v6] Introduce a bulk order-0 page allocator with two in-tree users

[Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 11:42:19AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> This series introduces a bulk order-0 page allocator with sunrpc and
> the network page pool being the first users. The implementation is not
> efficient as semantics needed to be ironed out first. If no other semantic
> changes are needed, it can be made more efficient.  Despite that, this
> is a performance-related for users that require multiple pages for an
> operation without multiple round-trips to the page allocator. Quoting
> the last patch for the high-speed networking use-case
> 
>             Kernel          XDP stats       CPU     pps           Delta
>             Baseline        XDP-RX CPU      total   3,771,046       n/a
>             List            XDP-RX CPU      total   3,940,242    +4.49%
>             Array           XDP-RX CPU      total   4,249,224   +12.68%
> 
> >From the SUNRPC traces of svc_alloc_arg()
> 
> 	Single page: 25.007 us per call over 532,571 calls
> 	Bulk list:    6.258 us per call over 517,034 calls
> 	Bulk array:   4.590 us per call over 517,442 calls
> 
> Both potential users in this series are corner cases (NFS and high-speed
> networks) so it is unlikely that most users will see any benefit in the
> short term. Other potential other users are batch allocations for page
> cache readahead, fault around and SLUB allocations when high-order pages
> are unavailable. It's unknown how much benefit would be seen by converting
> multiple page allocation calls to a single batch or what difference it may
> make to headline performance.

We have a third user, vmalloc(), with a 16% perf improvement.  I know the
email says 21% but that includes the 5% improvement from switching to
kvmalloc() to allocate area->pages.

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210323133948.GA10046@pc638.lan/

I don't know how many _frequent_ vmalloc users we have that will benefit
from this, but it's probably more than will benefit from improvements
to 200Gbit networking performance.