Re: [PATCH] mm: vmscan: consistent update to pgsteal and pgscan

[Yafang Shao <laoar.shao@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 4:49 AM Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> wrote:
>
> One way to measure the efficiency of memory reclaim is to look at the
> ratio (pgscan+pfrefill)/pgsteal. However at the moment these stats are
> not updated consistently at the system level and the ratio of these are
> not very meaningful. The pgsteal and pgscan are updated for only global
> reclaim while pgrefill gets updated for global as well as cgroup
> reclaim.
>

Hi Shakeel,

We always use pgscan and pgsteal for monitoring the system level
memory pressure, for example, by using sysstat(sar) or some other
monitor tools.
But with this change, these two counters include the memcg pressure as
well. It is not easy to know whether the pgscan and pgsteal are caused
by system level pressure or only some specific memcgs reaching their
memory limit.

How about adding  cgroup_reclaim() to pgrefill as well ?

> Please note that this difference is only for system level vmstats. The
> cgroup stats returned by memory.stat are actually consistent. The
> cgroup's pgsteal contains number of reclaimed pages for global as well
> as cgroup reclaim. So, one way to get the system level stats is to get
> these stats from root's memory.stat but root does not expose that
> interface. Also for !CONFIG_MEMCG machines /proc/vmstat is the only way
> to get these stats. So, make these stats consistent.
>
> Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
> ---
>  mm/vmscan.c | 6 ++----
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
> index cc555903a332..51f7d1efc912 100644
> --- a/mm/vmscan.c
> +++ b/mm/vmscan.c
> @@ -1943,8 +1943,7 @@ shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan, struct lruvec *lruvec,
>         reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[file] += nr_taken;
>
>         item = current_is_kswapd() ? PGSCAN_KSWAPD : PGSCAN_DIRECT;
> -       if (!cgroup_reclaim(sc))
> -               __count_vm_events(item, nr_scanned);
> +       __count_vm_events(item, nr_scanned);
>         __count_memcg_events(lruvec_memcg(lruvec), item, nr_scanned);
>         spin_unlock_irq(&pgdat->lru_lock);
>
> @@ -1957,8 +1956,7 @@ shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan, struct lruvec *lruvec,
>         spin_lock_irq(&pgdat->lru_lock);
>
>         item = current_is_kswapd() ? PGSTEAL_KSWAPD : PGSTEAL_DIRECT;
> -       if (!cgroup_reclaim(sc))
> -               __count_vm_events(item, nr_reclaimed);
> +       __count_vm_events(item, nr_reclaimed);
>         __count_memcg_events(lruvec_memcg(lruvec), item, nr_reclaimed);
>         reclaim_stat->recent_rotated[0] += stat.nr_activate[0];
>         reclaim_stat->recent_rotated[1] += stat.nr_activate[1];
> --
> 2.26.2.526.g744177e7f7-goog
>
>


-- 
Thanks
Yafang