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    mm: vmscan: use proportional scanning during direct reclaim and full scan at DEF_PRIORITY · 1a501907
    Mel Gorman authored
    
    
    Commit "mm: vmscan: obey proportional scanning requirements for kswapd"
    ensured that file/anon lists were scanned proportionally for reclaim from
    kswapd but ignored it for direct reclaim.  The intent was to minimse
    direct reclaim latency but Yuanhan Liu pointer out that it substitutes one
    long stall for many small stalls and distorts aging for normal workloads
    like streaming readers/writers.  Hugh Dickins pointed out that a
    side-effect of the same commit was that when one LRU list dropped to zero
    that the entirety of the other list was shrunk leading to excessive
    reclaim in memcgs.  This patch scans the file/anon lists proportionally
    for direct reclaim to similarly age page whether reclaimed by kswapd or
    direct reclaim but takes care to abort reclaim if one LRU drops to zero
    after reclaiming the requested number of pages.
    
    Based on ext4 and using the Intel VM scalability test
    
                                                  3.15.0-rc5            3.15.0-rc5
                                                    shrinker            proportion
    Unit  lru-file-readonce    elapsed      5.3500 (  0.00%)      5.4200 ( -1.31%)
    Unit  lru-file-readonce time_range      0.2700 (  0.00%)      0.1400 ( 48.15%)
    Unit  lru-file-readonce time_stddv      0.1148 (  0.00%)      0.0536 ( 53.33%)
    Unit lru-file-readtwice    elapsed      8.1700 (  0.00%)      8.1700 (  0.00%)
    Unit lru-file-readtwice time_range      0.4300 (  0.00%)      0.2300 ( 46.51%)
    Unit lru-file-readtwice time_stddv      0.1650 (  0.00%)      0.0971 ( 41.16%)
    
    The test cases are running multiple dd instances reading sparse files. The results are within
    the noise for the small test machine. The impact of the patch is more noticable from the vmstats
    
                                3.15.0-rc5  3.15.0-rc5
                                  shrinker  proportion
    Minor Faults                     35154       36784
    Major Faults                       611        1305
    Swap Ins                           394        1651
    Swap Outs                         4394        5891
    Allocation stalls               118616       44781
    Direct pages scanned           4935171     4602313
    Kswapd pages scanned          15921292    16258483
    Kswapd pages reclaimed        15913301    16248305
    Direct pages reclaimed         4933368     4601133
    Kswapd efficiency                  99%         99%
    Kswapd velocity             670088.047  682555.961
    Direct efficiency                  99%         99%
    Direct velocity             207709.217  193212.133
    Percentage direct scans            23%         22%
    Page writes by reclaim        4858.000    6232.000
    Page writes file                   464         341
    Page writes anon                  4394        5891
    
    Note that there are fewer allocation stalls even though the amount
    of direct reclaim scanning is very approximately the same.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
    Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
    Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarYuanhan Liu <yuanhan.liu@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com>
    Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
    Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
    Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    1a501907