mm: document the meminfo and vmstat fields of relevance to transparent hugepages

Update Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt and
Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt with some information on monitoring
transparent huge page usage and the associated overhead.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 62 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt b/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt
index 29bdf62aac0..f734bb2a78d 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt
+++ b/Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt
@@ -166,6 +166,68 @@ behavior. So to make them effective you need to restart any
 application that could have been using hugepages. This also applies to
 the regions registered in khugepaged.
 
+== Monitoring usage ==
+
+The number of transparent huge pages currently used by the system is
+available by reading the AnonHugePages field in /proc/meminfo. To
+identify what applications are using transparent huge pages, it is
+necessary to read /proc/PID/smaps and count the AnonHugePages fields
+for each mapping. Note that reading the smaps file is expensive and
+reading it frequently will incur overhead.
+
+There are a number of counters in /proc/vmstat that may be used to
+monitor how successfully the system is providing huge pages for use.
+
+thp_fault_alloc is incremented every time a huge page is successfully
+        allocated to handle a page fault. This applies to both the
+        first time a page is faulted and for COW faults.
+
+thp_collapse_alloc is incremented by khugepaged when it has found
+        a range of pages to collapse into one huge page and has
+        successfully allocated a new huge page to store the data.
+
+thp_fault_fallback is incremented if a page fault fails to allocate
+        a huge page and instead falls back to using small pages.
+
+thp_collapse_alloc_failed is incremented if khugepaged found a range
+        of pages that should be collapsed into one huge page but failed
+        the allocation.
+
+thp_split is incremented every time a huge page is split into base
+        pages. This can happen for a variety of reasons but a common
+        reason is that a huge page is old and is being reclaimed.
+
+As the system ages, allocating huge pages may be expensive as the
+system uses memory compaction to copy data around memory to free a
+huge page for use. There are some counters in /proc/vmstat to help
+monitor this overhead.
+
+compact_stall is incremented every time a process stalls to run
+        memory compaction so that a huge page is free for use.
+
+compact_success is incremented if the system compacted memory and
+        freed a huge page for use.
+
+compact_fail is incremented if the system tries to compact memory
+        but failed.
+
+compact_pages_moved is incremented each time a page is moved. If
+        this value is increasing rapidly, it implies that the system
+        is copying a lot of data to satisfy the huge page allocation.
+        It is possible that the cost of copying exceeds any savings
+        from reduced TLB misses.
+
+compact_pagemigrate_failed is incremented when the underlying mechanism
+        for moving a page failed.
+
+compact_blocks_moved is incremented each time memory compaction examines
+        a huge page aligned range of pages.
+
+It is possible to establish how long the stalls were using the function
+tracer to record how long was spent in __alloc_pages_nodemask and
+using the mm_page_alloc tracepoint to identify which allocations were
+for huge pages.
+
 == get_user_pages and follow_page ==
 
 get_user_pages and follow_page if run on a hugepage, will return the