Re: zram, OOM, and speed of allocation

[Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>]

Oh well, I found the problem, it's laptop_mode.  We keep it on by
default.  When I turn it off, I can allocate as fast as I can, and no
OOMs happen until swap is exhausted.

I don't think this is a desirable behavior even for laptop_mode, so if
anybody wants to help me debug it (or wants my help in debugging it)
do let me know.

Thanks!
Luigi

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com> wrote:
> Minchan:
>
> I tried your suggestion to move the call to wake_all_kswapd from after
> "restart:" to after "rebalance:".  The behavior is still similar, but
> slightly improved.  Here's what I see.
>
> Allocating as fast as I can: 1.5 GB of the 3 GB of zram swap are used,
> then OOM kills happen, and the system ends up with 1 GB swap used, 2
> unused.
>
> Allocating 10 MB/s: some kills happen when only 1 to 1.5 GB are used,
> and continue happening while swap fills up.  Eventually swap fills up
> completely.  This is better than before (could not go past about 1 GB
> of swap used), but there are too many kills too early.  I would like
> to see no OOM kills until swap is full or almost full.
>
> Allocating 20 MB/s: almost as good as with 10 MB/s, but more kills
> happen earlier, and not all swap space is used (400 MB free at the
> end).
>
> This is with 200 processes using 20 MB each, and 2:1 compression ratio.
>
> So it looks like kswapd is still not aggressive enough in pushing
> pages out.  What's the best way of changing that?  Play around with
> the watermarks?
>
> Incidentally, I also tried removing the min_filelist_kbytes hacky
> patch, but, as usual, the system thrashes so badly that it's
> impossible to complete any experiment.  I set it to a lower minimum
> amount of free file pages, 10 MB instead of the 50 MB which we use
> normally, and I could run with some thrashing, but I got the same
> results.
>
> Thanks!
> Luigi
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com> wrote:
>> I am beginning to understand why zram appears to work fine on our x86
>> systems but not on our ARM systems.  The bottom line is that swapping
>> doesn't work as I would expect when allocation is "too fast".
>>
>> In one of my tests, opening 50 tabs simultaneously in a Chrome browser
>> on devices with 2 GB of RAM and a zram-disk of 3 GB (uncompressed), I
>> was observing that on the x86 device all of the zram swap space was
>> used before OOM kills happened, but on the ARM device I would see OOM
>> kills when only about 1 GB (out of 3) was swapped out.
>>
>> I wrote a simple program to understand this behavior.  The program
>> (called "hog") allocates memory and fills it with a mix of
>> incompressible data (from /dev/urandom) and highly compressible data
>> (1's, just to avoid zero pages) in a given ratio.  The memory is never
>> touched again.
>>
>> It turns out that if I don't limit the allocation speed, I see
>> premature OOM kills also on the x86 device.  If I limit the allocation
>> to 10 MB/s, the premature OOM kills stop happening on the x86 device,
>> but still happen on the ARM device.  If I further limit the allocation
>> speed to 5 Mb/s, the premature OOM kills disappear also from the ARM
>> device.
>>
>> I have noticed a few time constants in the MM whose value is not well
>> explained, and I am wondering if the code is tuned for some ideal
>> system that doesn't behave like ours (considering, for instance, that
>> zram is much faster than swapping to a disk device, but it also uses
>> more CPU).  If this is plausible, I am wondering if anybody has
>> suggestions for changes that I could try out to obtain a better
>> behavior with a higher allocation speed.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Luigi

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