[PATCH v4 1/1] mm: vmscan: Reduce throttling due to a failure to make progress

[Shuang Zhai <szhai2@cs.rochester.edu>]

Hi Mel,

Mel Gorman wrote:
>
> Mike Galbraith, Alexey Avramov and Darrick Wong all reported similar
> problems due to reclaim throttling for excessive lengths of time.
> In Alexey's case, a memory hog that should go OOM quickly stalls for
> several minutes before stalling. In Mike and Darrick's cases, a small
> memcg environment stalled excessively even though the system had enough
> memory overall.
>

I recently found a regression when I tested MGLRU with fio on Linux
5.16-rc6 [1]. After this patch was applied, I re-ran the test with Linux
5.16, but the regression has not been fixed yet. 

The workload is to let fio perform random access on files with buffered
IO. The total file size is 2x the memory size. Files are stored on pmem.
For each configuration, I ran fio 10 times and reported the average and
the standard deviation.

Fio command
===========

$ numactl --cpubind=0 --membind=0 fio --name=randread \
  --directory=/mnt/pmem/ --size={10G, 5G} --io_size=1000TB \
  --time_based --numjobs={40, 80} --ioengine=io_uring \
  --ramp_time=20m --runtime=10m --iodepth=128 \
  --iodepth_batch_submit=32 --iodepth_batch_complete=32 \
  --rw=randread --random_distribution=random \
  --direct=0 --norandommap --group_reporting

Results in throughput (MB/s):
=============================

+------------+------+-------+------+-------+----------+-------+
| Jobs / CPU | 5.15 | stdev | 5.16 | stdev | 5.17-rc3 | stdev |
+------------+------+-------+------+-------+----------+-------+
| 1          | 8411 | 75    | 7459 | 38    | 7331     | 36    |
+------------+------+-------+------+-------+----------+-------+
| 2          | 8417 | 54    | 7491 | 41    | 7383     | 15    |
+------------+------+-------+------+-------+----------+-------+

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220105024423.26409-1-szhai2@cs.rochester.edu/

Thanks!

Shuang