From: Mel Gorman mgorman@techsingularity.net Subject: mm, vmscan: do not special-case slab reclaim when watermarks are boosted

Dave Chinner reported a problem pointing a finger at commit 1c30844d2dfe ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs"). The report is extensive (see https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20190807091858.2857-1-david@fromorbit.com/) and it's worth recording the most relevant parts (colorful language and typos included).

When running a simple, steady state 4kB file creation test to simulate extracting tarballs larger than memory full of small files into the filesystem, I noticed that once memory fills up the cache balance goes to hell.

The workload is creating one dirty cached inode for every dirty page, both of which should require a single IO each to clean and reclaim, and creation of inodes is throttled by the rate at which dirty writeback runs at (via balance dirty pages). Hence the ingest rate of new cached inodes and page cache pages is identical and steady. As a result, memory reclaim should quickly find a steady balance between page cache and inode caches.

The moment memory fills, the page cache is reclaimed at a much faster rate than the inode cache, and evidence suggests that the inode cache shrinker is not being called when large batches of pages are being reclaimed. In roughly the same time period that it takes to fill memory with 50% pages and 50% slab caches, memory reclaim reduces the page cache down to just dirty pages and slab caches fill the entirety of memory.

The LRU is largely full of dirty pages, and we're getting spikes of random writeback from memory reclaim so it's all going to shit. Behaviour never recovers, the page cache remains pinned at just dirty pages, and nothing I could tune would make any difference. vfs_cache_pressure makes no difference - I would set it so high it should trim the entire inode caches in a single pass, yet it didn't do anything. It was clear from tracing and live telemetry that the shrinkers were pretty much not running except when there was absolutely no memory free at all, and then they did the minimum necessary to free memory to make progress.

So I went looking at the code, trying to find places where pages got reclaimed and the shrinkers weren't called. There's only one - kswapd doing boosted reclaim as per commit 1c30844d2dfe ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs").

The watermark boosting introduced by the commit is triggered in response to an allocation "fragmentation event". The boosting was not intended to target THP specifically and triggers even if THP is disabled. However, with Dave's perfectly reasonable workload, fragmentation events can be very common given the ratio of slab to page cache allocations so boosting remains active for long periods of time.

As high-order allocations might use compaction and compaction cannot move slab pages the decision was made in the commit to special-case kswapd when watermarks are boosted -- kswapd avoids reclaiming slab as reclaiming slab does not directly help compaction.

As Dave notes, this decision means that slab can be artificially protected for long periods of time and messes up the balance with slab and page caches.

Removing the special casing can still indirectly help avoid fragmentation by avoiding fragmentation-causing events due to slab allocation as pages from a slab pageblock will have some slab objects freed. Furthermore, with the special casing, reclaim behaviour is unpredictable as kswapd sometimes examines slab and sometimes does not in a manner that is tricky to tune or analyse.

This patch removes the special casing. The downside is that this is not a universal performance win. Some benchmarks that depend on the residency of data when rereading metadata may see a regression when slab reclaim is restored to its original behaviour. Similarly, some benchmarks that only read-once or write-once may perform better when page reclaim is too aggressive. The primary upside is that slab shrinker is less surprising (arguably more sane but that's a matter of opinion), behaves consistently regardless of the fragmentation state of the system and properly obeys VM sysctls.

A fsmark benchmark configuration was constructed similar to what Dave reported and is codified by the mmtest configuration config-io-fsmark-small-file-stream. It was evaluated on a 1-socket machine to avoid dealing with NUMA-related issues and the timing of reclaim. The storage was an SSD Samsung Evo and a fresh trimmed XFS filesystem was used for the test data.

This is not an exact replication of Dave's setup. The configuration scales its parameters depending on the memory size of the SUT to behave similarly across machines. The parameters mean the first sample reported by fs_mark is using 50% of RAM which will barely be throttled and look like a big outlier. Dave used fake NUMA to have multiple kswapd instances which I didn't replicate. Finally, the number of iterations differ from Dave's test as the target disk was not large enough. While not identical, it should be representative.

fsmark 5.3.0-rc3 5.3.0-rc3 vanilla shrinker-v1r1 Min 1-files/sec 4444.80 ( 0.00%) 4765.60 ( 7.22%) 1st-qrtle 1-files/sec 5005.10 ( 0.00%) 5091.70 ( 1.73%) 2nd-qrtle 1-files/sec 4917.80 ( 0.00%) 4855.60 ( -1.26%) 3rd-qrtle 1-files/sec 4667.40 ( 0.00%) 4831.20 ( 3.51%) Max-1 1-files/sec 11421.50 ( 0.00%) 9999.30 ( -12.45%) Max-5 1-files/sec 11421.50 ( 0.00%) 9999.30 ( -12.45%) Max-10 1-files/sec 11421.50 ( 0.00%) 9999.30 ( -12.45%) Max-90 1-files/sec 4649.60 ( 0.00%) 4780.70 ( 2.82%) Max-95 1-files/sec 4491.00 ( 0.00%) 4768.20 ( 6.17%) Max-99 1-files/sec 4491.00 ( 0.00%) 4768.20 ( 6.17%) Max 1-files/sec 11421.50 ( 0.00%) 9999.30 ( -12.45%) Hmean 1-files/sec 5004.75 ( 0.00%) 5075.96 ( 1.42%) Stddev 1-files/sec 1778.70 ( 0.00%) 1369.66 ( 23.00%) CoeffVar 1-files/sec 33.70 ( 0.00%) 26.05 ( 22.71%) BHmean-99 1-files/sec 5053.72 ( 0.00%) 5101.52 ( 0.95%) BHmean-95 1-files/sec 5053.72 ( 0.00%) 5101.52 ( 0.95%) BHmean-90 1-files/sec 5107.05 ( 0.00%) 5131.41 ( 0.48%) BHmean-75 1-files/sec 5208.45 ( 0.00%) 5206.68 ( -0.03%) BHmean-50 1-files/sec 5405.53 ( 0.00%) 5381.62 ( -0.44%) BHmean-25 1-files/sec 6179.75 ( 0.00%) 6095.14 ( -1.37%)

5.3.0-rc3 5.3.0-rc3 vanillashrinker-v1r1 Duration User 501.82 497.29 Duration System 4401.44 4424.08 Duration Elapsed 8124.76 8358.05

This is showing a slight skew for the max result representing a large outlier for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd quartile are similar indicating that the bulk of the results show little difference. Note that an earlier version of the fsmark configuration showed a regression but that included more samples taken while memory was still filling.

Note that the elapsed time is higher. Part of this is that the configuration included time to delete all the test files when the test completes -- the test automation handles the possibility of testing fsmark with multiple thread counts. Without the patch, many of these objects would be memory resident which is part of what the patch is addressing.

There are other important observations that justify the patch.

1. With the vanilla kernel, the number of dirty pages in the system is very low for much of the test. With this patch, dirty pages is generally kept at 10% which matches vm.dirty_background_ratio which is normal expected historical behaviour.

2. With the vanilla kernel, the ratio of Slab/Pagecache is close to 0.95 for much of the test i.e. Slab is being left alone and dominating memory consumption. With the patch applied, the ratio varies between 0.35 and 0.45 with the bulk of the measured ratios roughly half way between those values. This is a different balance to what Dave reported but it was at least consistent.

3. Slabs are scanned throughout the entire test with the patch applied. The vanille kernel has periods with no scan activity and then relatively massive spikes.

4. Without the patch, kswapd scan rates are very variable. With the patch, the scan rates remain quite stead.

4. Overall vmstats are closer to normal expectations

5.3.0-rc3 5.3.0-rc3 vanilla shrinker-v1r1 Ops Direct pages scanned 99388.00 328410.00 Ops Kswapd pages scanned 45382917.00 33451026.00 Ops Kswapd pages reclaimed 30869570.00 25239655.00 Ops Direct pages reclaimed 74131.00 5830.00 Ops Kswapd efficiency % 68.02 75.45 Ops Kswapd velocity 5585.75 4002.25 Ops Page reclaim immediate 1179721.00 430927.00 Ops Slabs scanned 62367361.00 73581394.00 Ops Direct inode steals 2103.00 1002.00 Ops Kswapd inode steals 570180.00 5183206.00

o Vanilla kernel is hitting direct reclaim more frequently, not very much in absolute terms but the fact the patch reduces it is interesting o "Page reclaim immediate" in the vanilla kernel indicates dirty pages are being encountered at the tail of the LRU. This is generally bad and means in this case that the LRU is not long enough for dirty pages to be cleaned by the background flush in time. This is much reduced by the patch. o With the patch, kswapd is reclaiming 10 times more slab pages than with the vanilla kernel. This is indicative of the watermark boosting over-protecting slab

A more complete set of tests were run that were part of the basis for introducing boosting and while there are some differences, they are well within tolerances.

Bottom line, the special casing kswapd to avoid slab behaviour is unpredictable and can lead to abnormal results for normal workloads. This patch restores the expected behaviour that slab and page cache is balanced consistently for a workload with a steady allocation ratio of slab/pagecache pages. It also means that if there are workloads that favour the preservation of slab over pagecache that it can be tuned via vm.vfs_cache_pressure where as the vanilla kernel effectively ignores the parameter when boosting is active.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190808182946.GM2739@techsingularity.net Fixes: 1c30844d2dfe ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs") Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman mgorman@techsingularity.net Reviewed-by: Dave Chinner dchinner@redhat.com Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka vbabka@suse.cz Cc: Michal Hocko mhocko@kernel.org Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org [5.0+] Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton akpm@linux-foundation.org ---

mm/vmscan.c | 13 ++----------- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)

--- a/mm/vmscan.c~mm-vmscan-do-not-special-case-slab-reclaim-when-watermarks-are-boosted +++ a/mm/vmscan.c @@ -88,9 +88,6 @@ struct scan_control { /* Can pages be swapped as part of reclaim? */ unsigned int may_swap:1;

- /* e.g. boosted watermark reclaim leaves slabs alone */ - unsigned int may_shrinkslab:1; - /* * Cgroups are not reclaimed below their configured memory.low, * unless we threaten to OOM. If any cgroups are skipped due to @@ -2714,10 +2711,8 @@ static bool shrink_node(pg_data_t *pgdat shrink_node_memcg(pgdat, memcg, sc, &lru_pages); node_lru_pages += lru_pages;

- if (sc->may_shrinkslab) { - shrink_slab(sc->gfp_mask, pgdat->node_id, - memcg, sc->priority); - } + shrink_slab(sc->gfp_mask, pgdat->node_id, memcg, + sc->priority);

/* Record the group's reclaim efficiency */ vmpressure(sc->gfp_mask, memcg, false, @@ -3194,7 +3189,6 @@ unsigned long try_to_free_pages(struct z .may_writepage = !laptop_mode, .may_unmap = 1, .may_swap = 1, - .may_shrinkslab = 1, };

/* @@ -3238,7 +3232,6 @@ unsigned long mem_cgroup_shrink_node(str .may_unmap = 1, .reclaim_idx = MAX_NR_ZONES - 1, .may_swap = !noswap, - .may_shrinkslab = 1, }; unsigned long lru_pages;

@@ -3286,7 +3279,6 @@ unsigned long try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pag .may_writepage = !laptop_mode, .may_unmap = 1, .may_swap = may_swap, - .may_shrinkslab = 1, };

set_task_reclaim_state(current, &sc.reclaim_state); @@ -3598,7 +3590,6 @@ restart: */ sc.may_writepage = !laptop_mode && !nr_boost_reclaim; sc.may_swap = !nr_boost_reclaim; - sc.may_shrinkslab = !nr_boost_reclaim;

/* * Do some background aging of the anon list, to give _