Re: [PATCH 5/9] mm: memcontrol: add per memcg shrinker nr_deferred

[Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 8:54 PM Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 7:06 PM Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 02, 2020 at 10:27:21AM -0800, Yang Shi wrote:
> > > Currently the number of deferred objects are per shrinker, but some slabs, for example,
> > > vfs inode/dentry cache are per memcg, this would result in poor isolation among memcgs.
> > >
> > > The deferred objects typically are generated by __GFP_NOFS allocations, one memcg with
> > > excessive __GFP_NOFS allocations may blow up deferred objects, then other innocent memcgs
> > > may suffer from over shrink, excessive reclaim latency, etc.
> > >
> > > For example, two workloads run in memcgA and memcgB respectively, workload in B is vfs
> > > heavy workload.  Workload in A generates excessive deferred objects, then B's vfs cache
> > > might be hit heavily (drop half of caches) by B's limit reclaim or global reclaim.
> > >
> > > We observed this hit in our production environment which was running vfs heavy workload
> > > shown as the below tracing log:
> > >
> > > <...>-409454 [016] .... 28286961.747146: mm_shrink_slab_start: super_cache_scan+0x0/0x1a0 ffff9a83046f3458:
> > > nid: 1 objects to shrink 3641681686040 gfp_flags GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE|__GFP_ZERO pgs_scanned 1 lru_pgs 15721
> > > cache items 246404277 delta 31345 total_scan 123202138
> > > <...>-409454 [022] .... 28287105.928018: mm_shrink_slab_end: super_cache_scan+0x0/0x1a0 ffff9a83046f3458:
> > > nid: 1 unused scan count 3641681686040 new scan count 3641798379189 total_scan 602
> > > last shrinker return val 123186855
> > >
> > > The vfs cache and page cache ration was 10:1 on this machine, and half of caches were dropped.
> > > This also resulted in significant amount of page caches were dropped due to inodes eviction.
> > >
> > > Make nr_deferred per memcg for memcg aware shrinkers would solve the unfairness and bring
> > > better isolation.
> > >
> > > When memcg is not enabled (!CONFIG_MEMCG or memcg disabled), the shrinker's nr_deferred
> > > would be used.  And non memcg aware shrinkers use shrinker's nr_deferred all the time.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Yang Shi <shy828301@gmail.com>
> > > ---
> > >  include/linux/memcontrol.h |   9 +++
> > >  mm/memcontrol.c            | 112 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
> > >  mm/vmscan.c                |   4 ++
> > >  3 files changed, 123 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> > >
> > > diff --git a/include/linux/memcontrol.h b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
> > > index 922a7f600465..1b343b268359 100644
> > > --- a/include/linux/memcontrol.h
> > > +++ b/include/linux/memcontrol.h
> > > @@ -92,6 +92,13 @@ struct lruvec_stat {
> > >       long count[NR_VM_NODE_STAT_ITEMS];
> > >  };
> > >
> > > +
> > > +/* Shrinker::id indexed nr_deferred of memcg-aware shrinkers. */
> > > +struct memcg_shrinker_deferred {
> > > +     struct rcu_head rcu;
> > > +     atomic_long_t nr_deferred[];
> > > +};
> >
> > The idea makes total sense to me. But I wonder if we can add nr_deferred to
> > struct list_lru_one, instead of adding another per-memcg per-shrinker entity?
> > I guess it can simplify the code quite a lot. What do you think?
>
> Aha, actually this exactly was what I did at the first place. But Dave
> NAK'ed this approach. You can find the discussion at:
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200930073152.GH12096@dread.disaster.area/.

I did prototypes for both approaches (move nr_deferred to list_lru or
to memcg). I preferred the list_lru approach at the first place. But
Dave's opinion does make perfect sense to me. So I dropped that
list_lru one. That email elaborated why moving nr_deferred to list_lru
is not appropriate.