On Thu, 17 Dec 2009, Rik van Riel wrote:
After removing some more immediate bottlenecks with
the patches by Kosaki and me, Larry ran into a really
big one:
Larry Woodman wrote:
Finally, having said all that, the system still struggles reclaiming memoryThe system has 10000 processes, all of which are child
with
~10000 processes trying at the same time, you fix one bottleneck and it moves
somewhere else. The latest run showed all but one running process spinning
in
page_lock_anon_vma() trying for the anon_vma_lock. I noticed that there are
~5000 vma's linked to one anon_vma, this seems excessive!!!
I changed the anon_vma->lock to a rwlock_t and page_lock_anon_vma() to use
read_lock() so multiple callers could execute the page_reference_anon code.
This seems to help quite a bit.
processes of the same parent.
Pretty much all memory is anonymous memory.
This means that pretty much every anonymous page in the
system:
1) belongs to just one process, but
2) belongs to an anon_vma which is attached to 10,000 VMAs!
This results in page_referenced scanning 10,000 VMAs for
every page, despite the fact that each page is typically
only mapped into one process.
This seems to be our real scalability issue.
The only way out I can think is to have a new anon_vma
when we start a child process and to have COW place new
pages in the new anon_vma.
However, this is a bit of a paradigm shift in our object
rmap system and I am wondering if somebody else has a
better idea :)
Please first clarify whether what Larry is running is actually
a workload that people need to behave well in real life.