Re: [PATCH -v2] mm: Don't use radix tree writeback tags for pages in swap cache

From: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
To: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: tim.c.chen@intel.com, dave.hansen@intel.com,
	andi.kleen@intel.com, aaron.lu@intel.com, linux-mm@kvack.org,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>,
	Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>, Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>,
	Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>,
	Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>, Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH -v2] mm: Don't use radix tree writeback tags for pages in swap cache
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 14:29:52 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1472581792.10218.52.camel@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1472578089-5560-1-git-send-email-ying.huang@intel.com>

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On Tue, 2016-08-30 at 10:28 -0700, Huang, Ying wrote:
> From: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>
> 
> File pages use a set of radix tree tags (DIRTY, TOWRITE, WRITEBACK,
> etc.) to accelerate finding the pages with a specific tag in the
> radix
> tree during inode writeback.  But for anonymous pages in the swap
> cache, there is no inode writeback.  So there is no need to find the
> pages with some writeback tags in the radix tree.  It is not
> necessary
> to touch radix tree writeback tags for pages in the swap cache.
> 
> Per Rik van Riel's suggestion, a new flag AS_NO_WRITEBACK_TAGS is
> introduced for address spaces which don't need to update the
> writeback
> tags.  The flag is set for swap caches.  It may be used for DAX file
> systems, etc.
> 
> With this patch, the swap out bandwidth improved 22.3% (from ~1.2GB/s
> to
> ~ 1.48GBps) in the vm-scalability swap-w-seq test case with 8
> processes.
> The test is done on a Xeon E5 v3 system.  The swap device used is a
> RAM
> simulated PMEM (persistent memory) device.  The improvement comes
> from
> the reduced contention on the swap cache radix tree lock.  To test
> sequential swapping out, the test case uses 8 processes, which
> sequentially allocate and write to the anonymous pages until RAM and
> part of the swap device is used up.
> 
> Details of comparison is as follow,
> 
> base             base+patch
> ---------------- --------------------------
>          %stddev     %change         %stddev
>              \          |                \
>    2506952 ±  2%     +28.1%    3212076 ±  7%  vm-
> scalability.throughput
>    1207402 ±  7%     +22.3%    1476578 ±  6%  vmstat.swap.so
>      10.86 ± 12%     -23.4%       8.31 ± 16%  perf-profile.cycles-
> pp._raw_spin_lock_irq.__add_to_swap_cache.add_to_swap_cache.add_to_sw
> ap.shrink_page_list
>      10.82 ± 13%     -33.1%       7.24 ± 14%  perf-profile.cycles-
> pp._raw_spin_lock_irqsave.__remove_mapping.shrink_page_list.shrink_in
> active_list.shrink_zone_memcg
>      10.36 ± 11%    -100.0%       0.00 ± -1%  perf-profile.cycles-
> pp._raw_spin_lock_irqsave.__test_set_page_writeback.bdev_write_page._
> _swap_writepage.swap_writepage
>      10.52 ± 12%    -100.0%       0.00 ± -1%  perf-profile.cycles-
> pp._raw_spin_lock_irqsave.test_clear_page_writeback.end_page_writebac
> k.page_endio.pmem_rw_page
> 
> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
> Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
> Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
> Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
> Signed-off-by: "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@intel.com>
> 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>

-- 
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