Re: [PATCH 5/5] mm: vmscan: move dirty pages out of the way until they're flushed

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Mon 23-01-17 13:16:41, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> We noticed a performance regression when moving hadoop workloads from
> 3.10 kernels to 4.0 and 4.6. This is accompanied by increased pageout
> activity initiated by kswapd as well as frequent bursts of allocation
> stalls and direct reclaim scans. Even lowering the dirty ratios to the
> equivalent of less than 1% of memory would not eliminate the issue,
> suggesting that dirty pages concentrate where the scanner is looking.
> 
> This can be traced back to recent efforts of thrash avoidance. Where
> 3.10 would not detect refaulting pages and continuously supply clean
> cache to the inactive list, a thrashing workload on 4.0+ will detect
> and activate refaulting pages right away, distilling used-once pages
> on the inactive list much more effectively. This is by design, and it
> makes sense for clean cache. But for the most part our workload's
> cache faults are refaults and its use-once cache is from streaming
> writes. We end up with most of the inactive list dirty, and we don't
> go after the active cache as long as we have use-once pages around.
> 
> But waiting for writes to avoid reclaiming clean cache that *might*
> refault is a bad trade-off. Even if the refaults happen, reads are
> faster than writes. Before getting bogged down on writeback, reclaim
> should first look at *all* cache in the system, even active cache.
> 
> To accomplish this, activate pages that have been dirty or under
> writeback for two inactive LRU cycles. We know at this point that
> there are not enough clean inactive pages left to satisfy memory
> demand in the system. The pages are marked for immediate reclaim,
> meaning they'll get moved back to the inactive LRU tail as soon as
> they're written back and become reclaimable. But in the meantime, by
> reducing the inactive list to only immediately reclaimable pages, we
> allow the scanner to deactivate and refill the inactive list with
> clean cache from the active list tail to guarantee forward progress.

I was worried that the inactive list can shrink too low and that could
lead to pre-mature OOM declaration but should_reclaim_retry should cope
with this because it considers NR_ZONE_WRITE_PENDING which includes both
dirty and writeback pages.

That being said the patch makes sense to me

> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>

Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>

> ---
>  include/linux/mm_inline.h | 7 +++++++
>  mm/swap.c                 | 9 +++++----
>  mm/vmscan.c               | 6 +++---
>  3 files changed, 15 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/include/linux/mm_inline.h b/include/linux/mm_inline.h
> index 41d376e7116d..e030a68ead7e 100644
> --- a/include/linux/mm_inline.h
> +++ b/include/linux/mm_inline.h
> @@ -50,6 +50,13 @@ static __always_inline void add_page_to_lru_list(struct page *page,
>  	list_add(&page->lru, &lruvec->lists[lru]);
>  }
>  
> +static __always_inline void add_page_to_lru_list_tail(struct page *page,
> +				struct lruvec *lruvec, enum lru_list lru)
> +{
> +	update_lru_size(lruvec, lru, page_zonenum(page), hpage_nr_pages(page));
> +	list_add_tail(&page->lru, &lruvec->lists[lru]);
> +}
> +
>  static __always_inline void del_page_from_lru_list(struct page *page,
>  				struct lruvec *lruvec, enum lru_list lru)
>  {
> diff --git a/mm/swap.c b/mm/swap.c
> index aabf2e90fe32..c4910f14f957 100644
> --- a/mm/swap.c
> +++ b/mm/swap.c
> @@ -209,9 +209,10 @@ static void pagevec_move_tail_fn(struct page *page, struct lruvec *lruvec,
>  {
>  	int *pgmoved = arg;
>  
> -	if (PageLRU(page) && !PageActive(page) && !PageUnevictable(page)) {
> -		enum lru_list lru = page_lru_base_type(page);
> -		list_move_tail(&page->lru, &lruvec->lists[lru]);
> +	if (PageLRU(page) && !PageUnevictable(page)) {
> +		del_page_from_lru_list(page, lruvec, page_lru(page));
> +		ClearPageActive(page);
> +		add_page_to_lru_list_tail(page, lruvec, page_lru(page));
>  		(*pgmoved)++;
>  	}
>  }
> @@ -235,7 +236,7 @@ static void pagevec_move_tail(struct pagevec *pvec)
>   */
>  void rotate_reclaimable_page(struct page *page)
>  {
> -	if (!PageLocked(page) && !PageDirty(page) && !PageActive(page) &&
> +	if (!PageLocked(page) && !PageDirty(page) &&
>  	    !PageUnevictable(page) && PageLRU(page)) {
>  		struct pagevec *pvec;
>  		unsigned long flags;
> diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
> index df0fe0cc438e..947ab6f4db10 100644
> --- a/mm/vmscan.c
> +++ b/mm/vmscan.c
> @@ -1063,7 +1063,7 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
>  			    PageReclaim(page) &&
>  			    test_bit(PGDAT_WRITEBACK, &pgdat->flags)) {
>  				nr_immediate++;
> -				goto keep_locked;
> +				goto activate_locked;
>  
>  			/* Case 2 above */
>  			} else if (sane_reclaim(sc) ||
> @@ -1081,7 +1081,7 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
>  				 */
>  				SetPageReclaim(page);
>  				nr_writeback++;
> -				goto keep_locked;
> +				goto activate_locked;
>  
>  			/* Case 3 above */
>  			} else {
> @@ -1174,7 +1174,7 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
>  				inc_node_page_state(page, NR_VMSCAN_IMMEDIATE);
>  				SetPageReclaim(page);
>  
> -				goto keep_locked;
> +				goto activate_locked;
>  			}
>  
>  			if (references == PAGEREF_RECLAIM_CLEAN)
> -- 
> 2.11.0
> 
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-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs