Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] Introduce memcg_stock_pcp remote draining

[Leonardo Brás]

On Wed, 2023-01-25 at 09:33 +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 25-01-23 04:34:57, Leonardo Bras wrote:
> > Disclaimer:
> > a - The cover letter got bigger than expected, so I had to split it in
> >     sections to better organize myself. I am not very confortable with it.
> > b - Performance numbers below did not include patch 5/5 (Remove flags
> >     from memcg_stock_pcp), which could further improve performance for
> >     drain_all_stock(), but I could only notice the optimization at the
> >     last minute.
> > 
> > 
> > 0 - Motivation:
> > On current codebase, when drain_all_stock() is ran, it will schedule a
> > drain_local_stock() for each cpu that has a percpu stock associated with a
> > descendant of a given root_memcg.
> > 
> > This happens even on 'isolated cpus', a feature commonly used on workloads that
> > are sensitive to interruption and context switching such as vRAN and Industrial
> > Control Systems.
> > 
> > Since this scheduling behavior is a problem to those workloads, the proposal is
> > to replace the current local_lock + schedule_work_on() solution with a per-cpu
> > spinlock.
> 
> If IIRC we have also discussed that isolated CPUs can simply opt out
> from the pcp caching and therefore the problem would be avoided
> altogether without changes to the locking scheme. I do not see anything
> regarding that in this submission. Could you elaborate why you have
> abandoned this option?

Hello Michal,

I understand pcp caching is a nice to have.
So while I kept the idea of disabling pcp caching in mind as an option, I first
tried to understand what kind of impacts we would be seeing when trying to
change the locking scheme.

After I raised the data in the cover letter, I found that the performance impact
appears not be that big. So in order to try keeping the pcp cache on isolated
cpus active, I decided to focus effort on the locking scheme change.

I mean, my rationale is: if is there a non-expensive way of keeping the feature,
why should we abandon it?

Best regards,
Leo