Re: [PATCH] Revert "mm:vmscan: fix inaccurate reclaim during proactive reclaim"

[Yu Zhao <yuzhao@google.com>]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 2:44 PM T.J. Mercier <tjmercier@google.com> wrote:
>
> This reverts commit 0388536ac29104a478c79b3869541524caec28eb.
>
> Proactive reclaim on the root cgroup is 10x slower after this patch when
> MGLRU is enabled, and completion times for proactive reclaim on much
> smaller non-root cgroups take ~30% longer (with or without MGLRU). With
> root reclaim before the patch, I observe average reclaim rates of
> ~70k pages/sec before try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages starts to fail and
> the nr_retries counter starts to decrement, eventually ending the
> proactive reclaim attempt. After the patch the reclaim rate is
> consistently ~6.6k pages/sec due to the reduced nr_pages value causing
> scan aborts as soon as SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages are reclaimed. The
> proactive reclaim doesn't complete after several minutes because
> try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages is still capable of reclaiming pages in
> tiny SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX page chunks and nr_retries is never decremented.
>
> The docs for memory.reclaim say, "the kernel can over or under reclaim
> from the target cgroup" which this patch was trying to fix. Revert it
> until a less costly solution is found.
>
> Signed-off-by: T.J. Mercier <tjmercier@google.com>

Fixes: 0388536ac291 ("mm:vmscan: fix inaccurate reclaim during
proactive reclaim")
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>