Re: [PATCH] slub: Avoid direct compaction if possible

[Michal Hocko]

On Mon 17-06-13 16:34:23, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> On 15.06.2013 00:26, David Rientjes wrote:
> >On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> >
> >>>It's possible to avoid such problems (or at least to make them less probable)
> >>>by avoiding direct compaction. If it's not possible to allocate a contiguous
> >>>page without compaction, slub will fall back to order 0 page(s). In this case
> >>>kswapd will be woken to perform asynchronous compaction. So, slub can return
> >>>to default order allocations as soon as memory will be de-fragmented.
> >>
> >>Sounds like a good idea. Do you have some numbers to show the effect of
> >>this patch?
> >>
> >
> >I'm surprised you like this patch, it basically makes slub allocations to
> >be atomic and doesn't try memory compaction nor reclaim.  Asynchronous
> >compaction certainly isn't aggressive enough to mimick the effects of the
> >old lumpy reclaim that would have resulted in less fragmented memory.  If
> >slub is the only thing that is doing high-order allocations, it will start
> >falling back to the smallest page order much much more often.
> >
> >I agree that this doesn't seem like a slub issue at all but rather a page
> >allocator issue; if we have many simultaneous thp faults at the same time
> >and /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag is "always" then you'll get
> >the same problem if deferred compaction isn't helping.
> >
> >So I don't think we should be patching slub in any special way here.
> >
> >Roman, are you using the latest kernel?  If so, what does
> >grep compact_ /proc/vmstat show after one or more of these events?
> >
> 
> We're using 3.4. And the problem reveals when we moved from 3.2 to 3.4.
> It can be also reproduced on 3.5.

FWIW, there were some compaction locking related patches merged
around 3.7. See 2a1402aa044b55c2d30ab0ed9405693ef06fb07c and follow ups.

> I'll send the exact numbers as soon I'll reproduce it again.
> It can take up to 1 week.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Regards,
> Roman
> 
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-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
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