While running some memory intensive load, system response deteriorated just
after swap-out started.
The cause of this problem is that when a PG_reclaim page is moved to the tail
of the inactive LRU list in rotate_reclaimable_page(), lru_lock spin lock is
acquired every page writeback . This deteriorates system performance and
makes interrupt hold off time longer when swap-out started.
Following patch solves this problem. I use pagevec in rotating reclaimable
pages to mitigate LRU spin lock contention and reduce interrupt hold off time.
I did a test that allocating and touching pages in multiple processes, and
pinging to the test machine in flooding mode to measure response under memory
intensive load.
The test result is:
-2.6.23-rc5
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 53222ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.074/0.652/172.228/7.176 ms, pipe 11, ipg/ewma
17.746/0.092 ms
-2.6.23-rc5-patched
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 51924ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.072/0.108/3.884/0.114 ms, pipe 2, ipg/ewma
17.314/0.091 ms
Max round-trip-time was improved.
The test machine spec is that 4CPU(3.16GHz, Hyper-threading enabled)
8GB memory , 8GB swap.
I did ping test again to observe performance deterioration caused by taking
a ref.
-2.6.23-rc6-with-modifiedpatch
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 53386ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.074/0.110/4.716/0.147 ms, pipe 2, ipg/ewma 17.801/0.129 ms
The result for my original patch is as follows.
-2.6.23-rc5-with-originalpatch
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 51924ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.072/0.108/3.884/0.114 ms, pipe 2, ipg/ewma 17.314/0.091 ms
The influence to response was small.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix uninitalised var warning]
[hugh@veritas.com: fix locking]
[randy.dunlap@oracle.com: fix function declaration]
[hugh@veritas.com: fix BUG at include/linux/mm.h:220!]
[hugh@veritas.com: kill redundancy in rotate_reclaimable_page]
[hugh@veritas.com: move_tail_pages into lru_add_drain]
Signed-off-by: Hisashi Hifumi <hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
902aaed0d9