Re: Low TCP throughput due to vmpressure with swap enabled

[Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 12:46 PM Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 5:53 PM Ivan Babrou <ivan@cloudflare.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > We have observed a negative TCP throughput behavior from the following commit:
> >
> > * 8e8ae645249b mm: memcontrol: hook up vmpressure to socket pressure
> >
> > It landed back in 2016 in v4.5, so it's not exactly a new issue.
> >
> > The crux of the issue is that in some cases with swap present the
> > workload can be unfairly throttled in terms of TCP throughput.
> >
> > I am able to reproduce this issue in a VM locally on v6.1-rc6 with 8
> > GiB of RAM with zram enabled.
> >
> > The setup is fairly simple:
> >
> > 1. Run the following go proxy in one cgroup (it has some memory
> > ballast to simulate useful memory usage):
> >
> > * https://gist.github.com/bobrik/2c1a8a19b921fefe22caac21fda1be82
> >
> > sudo systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=6G go run main.go
> >
> > 2. Run the following fio config in another cgroup to simulate mmapped
> > page cache usage:
> >
> > [global]
> > size=8g
> > bs=256k
> > iodepth=256
> > direct=0
> > ioengine=mmap
> > group_reporting
> > time_based
> > runtime=86400
> > numjobs=8
> > name=randread
> > rw=randread
>
> Is it practical for your workload to apply some madvise/fadvise hint?
> For the above repro, it would be fadvise_hint=1 which is mapped into
> MADV_RANDOM automatically. The kernel also supports MADV_SEQUENTIAL,
> but not POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE at the moment.

Actually fadvise_hint already defaults to 1. At least with MGLRU, the
page cache should be thrown away without causing you any problem. It
might be mapped to POSIX_FADV_RANDOM rather than MADV_RANDOM.
POSIX_FADV_RANDOM is ignored at the moment.

Sorry for all the noise. Let me dig into this and get back to you later today.


> We actually have similar issues but unfortunately I haven't been able
> to come up with any solution beyond recommending the above flags.
> The problem is that harvesting the accessed bit from mmapped memory is
> costly, and when random accesses happen fast enough, the cost of doing
> that prevents LRU from collecting more information to make better
> decisions. In a nutshell, LRU can't tell whether there is genuine
> memory locality with your test case.
>
> It's a very difficult problem to solve from LRU's POV. I'd like to
> hear more about your workloads and see whether there are workarounds
> other than tackling the problem head-on, if applying hints is not
> practical or preferrable.