Re: [PATCHv6 00/22] Transparent huge page cache: phase 1, everything but mmap()

[Ning Qu <quning@google.com>]

I can throw in some numbers for one of the test case I am working on.

One of the workload is using sysv shm to load GB level files into
memory, which is shared with other worker processes for long term. We
could load as much file which fits all the physical memory available.
And also, the heap is pretty big (GB level as well) to handle those
data.

For the workload I just mentioned, with thp, we have about 8%
performance improvement, 5% from thp anonymous memory and 3% from thp
page cache. It might not look so good but it's pretty good without
changing one line of code in application, which is the beauty of thp.

Before that, we have been using hugetlbfs, then we have to reserve a
huge amount of memory at boot time, no matter those memory will be
used or not. It is working but no other major services could ever
share the server resources anymore.
Best wishes,
-- 
Ning Qu (曲宁) | Software Engineer | quning@google.com | +1-408-418-6066


On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:38 AM, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 11:51:06AM -0700, Andi Kleen wrote:
>> > AFAIK, this is not a problem in the vast majority of modern CPUs
>>
>> Let's do some simple math: e.g. a Sandy Bridge system has 512 4K iTLB L2 entries.
>> That's around 2MB. There's more and more code whose footprint exceeds
>> that.
>>
>
> With an expectation that it is read-mostly data, replicated between the
> caches accessing it and TLB refills taking very little time. This is not
> universally true and there are exceptions but even recent papers on TLB
> behaviour have tended to dismiss the iTLB refill overhead as a negligible
> portion of the overall workload of interest.
>
>> Besides iTLB is not the only target. It is also useful for
>> data of course.
>>
>
> True, but how useful? I have not seen an example of a workload showing that
> dTLB pressure on file-backed data was a major component of the workload. I
> would expect that sysV shared memory is an exception but does that require
> generic support for all filesystems or can tmpfs be special cased when
> it's used for shared memory?
>
> For normal data, if it's read-only data then there would be some benefit to
> using huge pages once the data is in page cache. How common are workloads
> that mmap() large amounts of read-only data? Possibly some databases
> depending on the workload although there I would expect that the data is
> placed in shared memory.
>
> If the mmap()s data is being written then the cost of IO is likely to
> dominate, not TLB pressure. For write-mostly workloads there are greater
> concerns because dirty tracking can only be done at the huge page boundary
> potentially leading to greater amounts of IO and degraded performance
> overall.
>
> I could be completely wrong here but these were the concerns I had when
> I first glanced through the patches. The changelogs had no information
> to convince me otherwise so I never dedicated the time to reviewing the
> patches in detail. I raised my concerns and then dropped it.
>
>> > > and I found it very hard to be motivated to review the series as a result.
>> > > I suspected that in many cases that the cost of IO would continue to dominate
>> > > performance instead of TLB pressure
>>
>> The trend is to larger and larger memories, keeping things in memory.
>>
>
> Yes, but using huge pages is not *necessarily* the answer. For fault
> scalability it probably would be a lot easier to batch handle faults if
> readahead indicates accesses are sequential. Background zeroing of pages
> could be revisited for fault intensive workloads. A potential alternative
> is that a contiguous page is allocated, zerod as one lump, split the pages
> and put onto a local per-task list although the details get messy. Reclaim
> scanning could be heavily modified to use collections of pages instead of
> single pages (although I'm not aware of the proper design of such a thing).
>
> Again, this could be completely off the mark but if it was me that was
> working on this problem, I would have some profile data from some workloads
> to make sure the part I'm optimising was a noticable percentage of the
> workload and included that in the patch leader. I would hope that the data
> was compelling enough to convince reviewers to pay close attention to the
> series as the complexity would then be justified. Based on how complex THP
> was for anonymous pages, I would be tempted to treat THP for file-backed
> data as a last resort.
>
>> In fact there's a good argument that memory sizes are growing faster
>> than TLB capacities. And without large TLBs we're even further off
>> the curve.
>>
>
> I'll admit this is also true. It was considered to be true in the 90's
> when huge pages were first being thrown around as a possible solution to
> the problem. One paper recently suggested using segmentation for large
> memory segments but the workloads they examined looked like they would
> be dominated by anonymous access, not file-backed data with one exception
> where the workload frequently accessed compile-time constants.
>
> --
> Mel Gorman
> SUSE Labs

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