THP defrag is enabled by default to direct reclaim/compact but not wake
kswapd in the event of a THP allocation failure. The problem is that
THP allocation requests potentially enter reclaim/compaction. This
potentially incurs a severe stall that is not guaranteed to be offset by
reduced TLB misses. While there has been considerable effort to reduce
the impact of reclaim/compaction, it is still a high cost and workloads
that should fit in memory fail to do so. Specifically, a simple
anon/file streaming workload will enter direct reclaim on NUMA at least
even though the working set size is 80% of RAM. It's been years and
it's time to throw in the towel.
First, this patch defines THP defrag as follows;
madvise: A failed allocation will direct reclaim/compact if the application requests it
never: Neither reclaim/compact nor wake kswapd
defer: A failed allocation will wake kswapd/kcompactd
always: A failed allocation will direct reclaim/compact (historical behaviour)
khugepaged defrag will enter direct/reclaim but not wake kswapd.
Next it sets the default defrag option to be "madvise" to only enter
direct reclaim/compaction for applications that specifically requested
it.
Lastly, it removes a check from the page allocator slowpath that is
related to __GFP_THISNODE to allow "defer" to work. The callers that
really cares are slub/slab and they are updated accordingly. The slab
one may be surprising because it also corrects a comment as kswapd was
never woken up by that path.
This means that a THP fault will no longer stall for most applications
by default and the ideal for most users that get THP if they are
immediately available. There are still options for users that prefer a
stall at startup of a new application by either restoring historical
behaviour with "always" or pick a half-way point with "defer" where
kswapd does some of the work in the background and wakes kcompactd if
necessary. THP defrag for khugepaged remains enabled and will enter
direct/reclaim but no wakeup kswapd or kcompactd.
After this patch a THP allocation failure will quickly fallback and rely
on khugepaged to recover the situation at some time in the future. In
some cases, this will reduce THP usage but the benefit of THP is hard to
measure and not a universal win where as a stall to reclaim/compaction
is definitely measurable and can be painful.
The first test for this is using "usemem" to read a large file and write
a large anonymous mapping (to avoid the zero page) multiple times. The
total size of the mappings is 80% of RAM and the benchmark simply
measures how long it takes to complete. It uses multiple threads to see
if that is a factor. On UMA, the performance is almost identical so is
not reported but on NUMA, we see this
usemem
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1 nodefrag-v1r3
Amean System-1 102.86 ( 0.00%) 46.81 ( 54.50%)
Amean System-4 37.85 ( 0.00%) 34.02 ( 10.12%)
Amean System-7 48.12 ( 0.00%) 46.89 ( 2.56%)
Amean System-12 51.98 ( 0.00%) 56.96 ( -9.57%)
Amean System-21 80.16 ( 0.00%) 79.05 ( 1.39%)
Amean System-30 110.71 ( 0.00%) 107.17 ( 3.20%)
Amean System-48 127.98 ( 0.00%) 124.83 ( 2.46%)
Amean Elapsd-1 185.84 ( 0.00%) 105.51 ( 43.23%)
Amean Elapsd-4 26.19 ( 0.00%) 25.58 ( 2.33%)
Amean Elapsd-7 21.65 ( 0.00%) 21.62 ( 0.16%)
Amean Elapsd-12 18.58 ( 0.00%) 17.94 ( 3.43%)
Amean Elapsd-21 17.53 ( 0.00%) 16.60 ( 5.33%)
Amean Elapsd-30 17.45 ( 0.00%) 17.13 ( 1.84%)
Amean Elapsd-48 15.40 ( 0.00%) 15.27 ( 0.82%)
For a single thread, the benchmark completes 43.23% faster with this
patch applied with smaller benefits as the thread increases. Similar,
notice the large reduction in most cases in system CPU usage. The
overall CPU time is
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1 nodefrag-v1r3
User 10357.65 10438.33
System 3988.88 3543.94
Elapsed 2203.01 1634.41
Which is substantial. Now, the reclaim figures
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1nodefrag-v1r3
Minor Faults 128458477 278352931
Major Faults 2174976 225
Swap Ins 16904701 0
Swap Outs 17359627 0
Allocation stalls 43611 0
DMA allocs 0 0
DMA32 allocs 19832646 19448017
Normal allocs 614488453 580941839
Movable allocs 0 0
Direct pages scanned 24163800 0
Kswapd pages scanned 0 0
Kswapd pages reclaimed 0 0
Direct pages reclaimed 20691346 0
Compaction stalls 42263 0
Compaction success 938 0
Compaction failures 41325 0
This patch eliminates almost all swapping and direct reclaim activity.
There is still overhead but it's from NUMA balancing which does not
identify that it's pointless trying to do anything with this workload.
I also tried the thpscale benchmark which forces a corner case where
compaction can be used heavily and measures the latency of whether base
or huge pages were used
thpscale Fault Latencies
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1 nodefrag-v1r3
Amean fault-base-1 5288.84 ( 0.00%) 2817.12 ( 46.73%)
Amean fault-base-3 6365.53 ( 0.00%) 3499.11 ( 45.03%)
Amean fault-base-5 6526.19 ( 0.00%) 4363.06 ( 33.15%)
Amean fault-base-7 7142.25 ( 0.00%) 4858.08 ( 31.98%)
Amean fault-base-12 13827.64 ( 0.00%) 10292.11 ( 25.57%)
Amean fault-base-18 18235.07 ( 0.00%) 13788.84 ( 24.38%)
Amean fault-base-24 21597.80 ( 0.00%) 24388.03 (-12.92%)
Amean fault-base-30 26754.15 ( 0.00%) 19700.55 ( 26.36%)
Amean fault-base-32 26784.94 ( 0.00%) 19513.57 ( 27.15%)
Amean fault-huge-1 4223.96 ( 0.00%) 2178.57 ( 48.42%)
Amean fault-huge-3 2194.77 ( 0.00%) 2149.74 ( 2.05%)
Amean fault-huge-5 2569.60 ( 0.00%) 2346.95 ( 8.66%)
Amean fault-huge-7 3612.69 ( 0.00%) 2997.70 ( 17.02%)
Amean fault-huge-12 3301.75 ( 0.00%) 6727.02 (-103.74%)
Amean fault-huge-18 6696.47 ( 0.00%) 6685.72 ( 0.16%)
Amean fault-huge-24 8000.72 ( 0.00%) 9311.43 (-16.38%)
Amean fault-huge-30 13305.55 ( 0.00%) 9750.45 ( 26.72%)
Amean fault-huge-32 9981.71 ( 0.00%) 10316.06 ( -3.35%)
The average time to fault pages is substantially reduced in the majority
of caseds but with the obvious caveat that fewer THPs are actually used
in this adverse workload
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1 nodefrag-v1r3
Percentage huge-1 0.71 ( 0.00%) 14.04 (1865.22%)
Percentage huge-3 10.77 ( 0.00%) 33.05 (206.85%)
Percentage huge-5 60.39 ( 0.00%) 38.51 (-36.23%)
Percentage huge-7 45.97 ( 0.00%) 34.57 (-24.79%)
Percentage huge-12 68.12 ( 0.00%) 40.07 (-41.17%)
Percentage huge-18 64.93 ( 0.00%) 47.82 (-26.35%)
Percentage huge-24 62.69 ( 0.00%) 44.23 (-29.44%)
Percentage huge-30 43.49 ( 0.00%) 55.38 ( 27.34%)
Percentage huge-32 50.72 ( 0.00%) 51.90 ( 2.35%)
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1nodefrag-v1r3
Minor Faults 37429143 47564000
Major Faults 1916 1558
Swap Ins 1466 1079
Swap Outs 2936863 149626
Allocation stalls 62510 3
DMA allocs 0 0
DMA32 allocs 6566458 6401314
Normal allocs 216361697 216538171
Movable allocs 0 0
Direct pages scanned 25977580 17998
Kswapd pages scanned 0 3638931
Kswapd pages reclaimed 0 207236
Direct pages reclaimed 8833714 88
Compaction stalls 103349 5
Compaction success 270 4
Compaction failures 103079 1
Note again that while this does swap as it's an aggressive workload, the
direct relcim activity and allocation stalls is substantially reduced.
There is some kswapd activity but ftrace showed that the kswapd activity
was due to normal wakeups from 4K pages being allocated.
Compaction-related stalls and activity are almost eliminated.
I also tried the stutter benchmark. For this, I do not have figures for
NUMA but it's something that does impact UMA so I'll report what is
available
stutter
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1 nodefrag-v1r3
Min mmap 7.3571 ( 0.00%) 7.3438 ( 0.18%)
1st-qrtle mmap 7.5278 ( 0.00%) 17.9200 (-138.05%)
2nd-qrtle mmap 7.6818 ( 0.00%) 21.6055 (-181.25%)
3rd-qrtle mmap 11.0889 ( 0.00%) 21.8881 (-97.39%)
Max-90% mmap 27.8978 ( 0.00%) 22.1632 ( 20.56%)
Max-93% mmap 28.3202 ( 0.00%) 22.3044 ( 21.24%)
Max-95% mmap 28.5600 ( 0.00%) 22.4580 ( 21.37%)
Max-99% mmap 29.6032 ( 0.00%) 25.5216 ( 13.79%)
Max mmap 4109.7289 ( 0.00%) 4813.9832 (-17.14%)
Mean mmap 12.4474 ( 0.00%) 19.3027 (-55.07%)
This benchmark is trying to fault an anonymous mapping while there is a
heavy IO load -- a scenario that desktop users used to complain about
frequently. This shows a mix because the ideal case of mapping with THP
is not hit as often. However, note that 99% of the mappings complete
13.79% faster. The CPU usage here is particularly interesting
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1nodefrag-v1r3
User 67.50 0.99
System 1327.88 91.30
Elapsed 2079.00 2128.98
And once again we look at the reclaim figures
4.4.0 4.4.0
kcompactd-v1r1nodefrag-v1r3
Minor Faults 335241922 1314582827
Major Faults 715 819
Swap Ins 0 0
Swap Outs 0 0
Allocation stalls 532723 0
DMA allocs 0 0
DMA32 allocs 1822364341 1177950222
Normal allocs 1815640808 1517844854
Movable allocs 0 0
Direct pages scanned 21892772 0
Kswapd pages scanned 20015890 41879484
Kswapd pages reclaimed 19961986 41822072
Direct pages reclaimed 21892741 0
Compaction stalls 1065755 0
Compaction success 514 0
Compaction failures 1065241 0
Allocation stalls and all direct reclaim activity is eliminated as well
as compaction-related stalls.
THP gives impressive gains in some cases but only if they are quickly
available. We're not going to reach the point where they are completely
free so lets take the costs out of the fast paths finally and defer the
cost to kswapd, kcompactd and khugepaged where it belongs.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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