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authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>2009-06-16 18:33:20 -0400
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-06-16 22:47:45 -0400
commit90afa5de6f3fa89a733861e843377302479fcf7e (patch)
tree2870878fa3361c27551b5a18c4732073ae1432bd /Documentation/sysctl
parent84a892456046921a40646114deed65e2df93a1bc (diff)
vmscan: properly account for the number of page cache pages zone_reclaim() can reclaim
A bug was brought to my attention against a distro kernel but it affects mainline and I believe problems like this have been reported in various guises on the mailing lists although I don't have specific examples at the moment. The reported problem was that malloc() stalled for a long time (minutes in some cases) if a large tmpfs mount was occupying a large percentage of memory overall. The pages did not get cleaned or reclaimed by zone_reclaim() because the zone_reclaim_mode was unsuitable, but the lists are uselessly scanned frequencly making the CPU spin at near 100%. This patchset intends to address that bug and bring the behaviour of zone_reclaim() more in line with expectations which were noticed during investigation. It is based on top of mmotm and takes advantage of Kosaki's work with respect to zone_reclaim(). Patch 1 fixes the heuristics that zone_reclaim() uses to determine if the scan should go ahead. The broken heuristic is what was causing the malloc() stall as it uselessly scanned the LRU constantly. Currently, zone_reclaim is assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 and historically it could not deal with tmpfs pages at all. This fixes up the heuristic so that an unnecessary scan is more likely to be correctly avoided. Patch 2 notes that zone_reclaim() returning a failure automatically means the zone is marked full. This is not always true. It could have failed because the GFP mask or zone_reclaim_mode were unsuitable. Patch 3 introduces a counter zreclaim_failed that will increment each time the zone_reclaim scan-avoidance heuristics fail. If that counter is rapidly increasing, then zone_reclaim_mode should be set to 0 as a temporarily resolution and a bug reported because the scan-avoidance heuristic is still broken. This patch: On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that is a more targetted form of direct reclaim. On machines with large NUMA distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not being met. There is a heuristic that determines if the scan is worthwhile but the problem is that the heuristic is not being properly applied and is basically assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 if it is enabled. The lack of proper detection can manfiest as high CPU usage as the LRU list is scanned uselessly. Historically, once enabled it was depending on NR_FILE_PAGES which may include swapcache pages that the reclaim_mode cannot deal with. Patch vmscan-change-the-number-of-the-unmapped-files-in-zone-reclaim.patch by Kosaki Motohiro noted that zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_PAGES) included pages that were not file-backed such as swapcache and made a calculation based on the inactive, active and mapped files. This is far superior when zone_reclaim==1 but if RECLAIM_SWAP is set, then NR_FILE_PAGES is a reasonable starting figure. This patch alters how zone_reclaim() works out how many pages it might be able to reclaim given the current reclaim_mode. If RECLAIM_SWAP is set in the reclaim_mode it will either consider NR_FILE_PAGES as potential candidates or else use NR_{IN}ACTIVE}_PAGES-NR_FILE_MAPPED to discount swapcache and other non-file-backed pages. If RECLAIM_WRITE is not set, then NR_FILE_DIRTY number of pages are not candidates. If RECLAIM_SWAP is not set, then NR_FILE_MAPPED are not. [kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: Estimate unmapped pages minus tmpfs pages] [fengguang.wu@intel.com: Fix underflow problem in Kosaki's estimate] Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sysctl')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt12
1 files changed, 8 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 0ea5adbc5b16..c4de6359d440 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -315,10 +315,14 @@ min_unmapped_ratio:
315 315
316This is available only on NUMA kernels. 316This is available only on NUMA kernels.
317 317
318A percentage of the total pages in each zone. Zone reclaim will only 318This is a percentage of the total pages in each zone. Zone reclaim will
319occur if more than this percentage of pages are file backed and unmapped. 319only occur if more than this percentage of pages are in a state that
320This is to insure that a minimal amount of local pages is still available for 320zone_reclaim_mode allows to be reclaimed.
321file I/O even if the node is overallocated. 321
322If zone_reclaim_mode has the value 4 OR'd, then the percentage is compared
323against all file-backed unmapped pages including swapcache pages and tmpfs
324files. Otherwise, only unmapped pages backed by normal files but not tmpfs
325files and similar are considered.
322 326
323The default is 1 percent. 327The default is 1 percent.
324 328