The goal of direct compaction is to quickly make a high-order page
available for the pending allocation. Within an aligned block of pages
of desired order, a single allocated page that cannot be isolated for
migration means that the block cannot fully merge to a buddy page that
would satisfy the allocation request. Therefore we can reduce the
allocation stall by skipping the rest of the block immediately on
isolation failure. For async compaction, this also means a higher
chance of succeeding until it detects contention.
We however shouldn't completely sacrifice the second objective of
compaction, which is to reduce overal long-term memory fragmentation.
As a compromise, perform the eager skipping only in direct async
compaction, while sync compaction (including kcompactd) remains
thorough.
Testing was done using stress-highalloc from mmtests, configured for
order-4 GFP_KERNEL allocations:
4.6-rc1 4.6-rc1
before after
Success 1 Min 24.00 ( 0.00%) 27.00 (-12.50%)
Success 1 Mean 30.20 ( 0.00%) 31.60 ( -4.64%)
Success 1 Max 37.00 ( 0.00%) 35.00 ( 5.41%)
Success 2 Min 42.00 ( 0.00%) 32.00 ( 23.81%)
Success 2 Mean 44.00 ( 0.00%) 44.80 ( -1.82%)
Success 2 Max 48.00 ( 0.00%) 52.00 ( -8.33%)
Success 3 Min 91.00 ( 0.00%) 92.00 ( -1.10%)
Success 3 Mean 92.20 ( 0.00%) 92.80 ( -0.65%)
Success 3 Max 94.00 ( 0.00%) 93.00 ( 1.06%)
We can see that success rates are unaffected by the skipping.
4.6-rc1 4.6-rc1
before after
User 2587.42 2566.53
System 482.89 471.20
Elapsed 1395.68 1382.00
Times are not so useful metric for this benchmark as main portion is the
interfering kernel builds, but results do hint at reduced system times.
4.6-rc1 4.6-rc1
before after
Direct pages scanned 163614 159608
Kswapd pages scanned 2070139 2078790
Kswapd pages reclaimed 2061707 2069757
Direct pages reclaimed 163354 159505
Reduced direct reclaim was unintended, but could be explained by more
successful first attempt at (async) direct compaction, which is
attempted before the first reclaim attempt in __alloc_pages_slowpath().
Compaction stalls 33052 39853
Compaction success 12121 19773
Compaction failures 20931 20079
Compaction is indeed more successful, and thus less likely to get
deferred, so there are also more direct compaction stalls.
Page migrate success 3781876 3326819
Page migrate failure 45817 41774
Compaction pages isolated 7868232 6941457
Compaction migrate scanned 168160492 127269354
Compaction migrate prescanned 0 0
Compaction free scanned 2522142582 2326342620
Compaction free direct alloc 0 0
Compaction free dir. all. miss 0 0
Compaction cost 5252 4476
The patch reduces migration scanned pages by 25% thanks to the eager
skipping.
[hughd@google.com: prevent nr_isolated_* from going negative]
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
fdd048e12c