Re: [LKP] [page cache] eb797a8ee0: vm-scalability.throughput -16.5% regression

[Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>]

On 02/27/2019 08:18 PM, Huang, Ying wrote:
> Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> writes:
>
>> On 02/26/2019 12:30 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 12:17 AM Huang, Ying <ying.huang@intel.com> wrote:
>>>> As for fixing.  Should we care about the cache line alignment of struct
>>>> inode?  Or its size is considered more important because there may be a
>>>> huge number of struct inode in the system?
>>> Thanks for the great analysis.
>>>
>>> I suspect we _would_ like to make sure inodes are as small as
>>> possible, since they are everywhere. Also, they are usually embedded
>>> in other structures (ie "struct inode" is embedded into "struct
>>> ext4_inode_info"), and unless we force alignment (and thus possibly
>>> lots of padding), the actual alignment of 'struct inode' will vary
>>> depending on filesystem.
>>>
>>> So I would suggest we *not* do cacheline alignment, because it will
>>> result in random padding.
>>>
>>> But it sounds like maybe the solution is to make sure that the
>>> different fields of the inode can and should be packed differently?
>>>
>>> So one thing to look at is to see what fields in 'struct inode' might
>>> be best moved together, to minimize cache accesses.
>>>
>>> And in particular, if this is *only* an issue of "struct
>>> rw_semaphore", maybe we should look at the layout of *that*. In
>>> particular, I'm getting the feeling that we should put the "owner"
>>> field right next to the "count" field, because the normal
>>> non-contended path only touches those two fields.
>> That is true. Putting the two next to each other reduces the chance of
>> needing to touch 2 cachelines to acquire a rwsem.
>>
>>> Right now those two fields are pretty far from each other in 'struct
>>> rw_semaphore', which then makes the "oops they got allocated in
>>> different cachelines" much more likely.
>>>
>>> So even if 'struct inode' layout itself isn't changed, maybe just
>>> optimizing the layout of 'struct rw_semaphore' a bit for the common
>>> case might fix it all up.
>>>
>>> Waiman, I didn't check if your rewrite already possibly fixes this?
>> My current patch doesn't move the owner field, but I will add one to do
>> it. That change alone probably won't solve the regression we see here.
>> The optimistic spinner is spinning on the on_cpu flag of the task
>> structure as well as the rwsem->owner value (looking for change). The
>> lock holder only need to touch the count/owner values once at unlock.
>> However, if other hot data variables are in the same cacheline as
>> rwsem->owner, we will have cacaheline bouncing problem. So we need to
>> pad some rarely touched variables right before the rwsem in order to
>> reduce the chance of false cacheline sharing.
> Yes. And if my understanding were correct, if the rwsem is locked, the
> new rw_sem users (which calls down_write()) will write rwsem->count and
> some other fields of rwsem.  This will cause cache ping-pong between
> lock holder and the new users too if the memory accessed by lock holder
> shares the same cache line with rwsem->count, thus hurt the system
> performance.  For the regression reported, the rwsem holder will change
> address_space->i_mmap, if I put i_mmap and rwsem->count in the same
> cache line and rwsem->owner in a different cache line, the performance
> can improve ~8.3%.  While if I put i_mmap in one cache line and all
> fields of rwsem in another different cache line, the performance can
> improve ~12.9% (in another machine, where the regression is ~14%).

So it is better to have i_mmap and the rwsem in separate cachelines. Right?

> So I think in the heavily contended situation, we should put the fields
> accessed by rwsem holder in a different cache line of rwsem.  But in
> un-contended situation, we should put the fields accessed in rwsem
> holder and rwsem in the same cache line to reduce the cache footprint.
> The requirement of un-contended and heavily contended situation is
> contradicted.

Write to the rwsem's count mostly happens at lock and unlock times. It
is the constant spinning on owner by the optimistic waiter that is
likely to cause the most problem when its cacheline is shared with
another piece of data outside of the rwsem that is rewritten to fairly
frequently. Perhaps moving i_mmap further away from i_mmap_rwsem may help.

Cheers,
Longman