Re: [RFC 2/2] mm, slub: add shrinker to reclaim cached slabs

[Vlastimil Babka]

On 1/22/21 1:48 AM, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 06:21:54PM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> 
> Hi Vlastimil!
> 
> This makes a lot of sense, however it looks a bit as an overkill to me (on 5.9+).
> Isn't limiting a number of pages (instead of number of objects) sufficient on 5.9+?

It would help, but fundamentally there can still be a lot of memory locked up
with e.g. many CPU's. We should have a way to flush this automatically, like for
other cached things.

> If not, maybe we can limit the shrinking to the pre-OOM condition?
> Do we really need to trip it constantly?

The priority could be reduced, pre-OOM might be too extreme. Why reclaim e.g.
actually used LRU pages instead of unused slab pages?
IMHO a frequently reclaiming system probably doesn't benefit from SLUB's peak
performance at that point anyway...

> Thanks!
>