[PATCH] Cgroup: Fix memory accounting scalability inshrink_page_list

From: Tim Chen
Date: Thu Jul 19 2012 - 19:34:21 EST


Hi,

I noticed in a multi-process parallel files reading benchmark I ran on a
8 socket machine, throughput slowed down by a factor of 8 when I ran
the benchmark within a cgroup container. I traced the problem to the
following code path (see below) when we are trying to reclaim memory
from file cache. The res_counter_uncharge function is called on every
page that's reclaimed and created heavy lock contention. The patch
below allows the reclaimed pages to be uncharged from the resource
counter in batch and recovered the regression.

Tim

40.67% usemem [kernel.kallsyms] [k] _raw_spin_lock
|
--- _raw_spin_lock
|
|--92.61%-- res_counter_uncharge
| |
| |--100.00%-- __mem_cgroup_uncharge_common
| | |
| | |--100.00%-- mem_cgroup_uncharge_cache_page
| | | __remove_mapping
| | | shrink_page_list
| | | shrink_inactive_list
| | | shrink_mem_cgroup_zone
| | | shrink_zone
| | | do_try_to_free_pages
| | | try_to_free_pages
| | | __alloc_pages_nodemask
| | | alloc_pages_current


---
Signed-off-by: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 33dc256..aac5672 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -779,6 +779,7 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,

cond_resched();

+ mem_cgroup_uncharge_start();
while (!list_empty(page_list)) {
enum page_references references;
struct address_space *mapping;
@@ -1026,6 +1027,7 @@ keep_lumpy:

list_splice(&ret_pages, page_list);
count_vm_events(PGACTIVATE, pgactivate);
+ mem_cgroup_uncharge_end();
*ret_nr_dirty += nr_dirty;
*ret_nr_writeback += nr_writeback;
return nr_reclaimed;


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