Re: [PATCH] mm: Make count list_lru_one::nr_items lockless

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Sep 27 2017 - 17:15:37 EST


On Tue, 19 Sep 2017 18:06:33 +0300 Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> During the reclaiming slab of a memcg, shrink_slab iterates
> over all registered shrinkers in the system, and tries to count
> and consume objects related to the cgroup. In case of memory
> pressure, this behaves bad: I observe high system time and
> time spent in list_lru_count_one() for many processes on RHEL7
> kernel (collected via $perf record --call-graph fp -j k -a):
>
> 0,50% nixstatsagent [kernel.vmlinux] [k] _raw_spin_lock [k] _raw_spin_lock
> 0,26% nixstatsagent [kernel.vmlinux] [k] shrink_slab [k] shrink_slab
> 0,23% nixstatsagent [kernel.vmlinux] [k] super_cache_count [k] super_cache_count
> 0,15% nixstatsagent [kernel.vmlinux] [k] __list_lru_count_one.isra.2 [k] _raw_spin_lock
> 0,15% nixstatsagent [kernel.vmlinux] [k] list_lru_count_one [k] __list_lru_count_one.isra.2
>
> 0,94% mysqld [kernel.vmlinux] [k] _raw_spin_lock [k] _raw_spin_lock
> 0,57% mysqld [kernel.vmlinux] [k] shrink_slab [k] shrink_slab
> 0,51% mysqld [kernel.vmlinux] [k] super_cache_count [k] super_cache_count
> 0,32% mysqld [kernel.vmlinux] [k] __list_lru_count_one.isra.2 [k] _raw_spin_lock
> 0,32% mysqld [kernel.vmlinux] [k] list_lru_count_one [k] __list_lru_count_one.isra.2
>
> 0,73% sshd [kernel.vmlinux] [k] _raw_spin_lock [k] _raw_spin_lock
> 0,35% sshd [kernel.vmlinux] [k] shrink_slab [k] shrink_slab
> 0,32% sshd [kernel.vmlinux] [k] super_cache_count [k] super_cache_count
> 0,21% sshd [kernel.vmlinux] [k] __list_lru_count_one.isra.2 [k] _raw_spin_lock
> 0,21% sshd [kernel.vmlinux] [k] list_lru_count_one [k] __list_lru_count_one.isra.2
>
> This patch aims to make super_cache_count() (and other functions,
> which count LRU nr_items) more effective.
> It allows list_lru_node::memcg_lrus to be RCU-accessed, and makes
> __list_lru_count_one() count nr_items lockless to minimize
> overhead introduced by locking operation, and to make parallel
> reclaims more scalable.

And... what were the effects of the patch? Did you not run the same
performance tests after applying it?