Previously we were using the ratio of the number of lru pages scanned to
the number of eligible lru pages to determine the number of slab objects
to scan. The problem with this is that these two things have nothing to
do with each other, so in slab heavy work loads where there is little to
no page cache we can end up with the pages scanned being a very low
number. This means that we reclaim next to no slab pages and waste a
lot of time reclaiming small amounts of space.
Consider the following scenario, where we have the following values and
the rest of the memory usage is in slab
Active: 58840 kB
Inactive: 46860 kB
Every time we do a get_scan_count() we do this
scan = size >> sc->priority
where sc->priority starts at DEF_PRIORITY, which is 12. The first loop
through reclaim would result in a scan target of 2 pages to 11715 total
inactive pages, and 3 pages to 14710 total active pages. This is a
really really small target for a system that is entirely slab pages.
And this is super optimistic, this assumes we even get to scan these
pages. We don't increment sc->nr_scanned unless we 1) isolate the page,
which assumes it's not in use, and 2) can lock the page. Under pressure
these numbers could probably go down, I'm sure there's some random pages
from daemons that aren't actually in use, so the targets get even
smaller.
Instead use sc->priority in the same way we use it to determine scan
amounts for the lru's. This generally equates to pages. Consider the
following
slab_pages = (nr_objects * object_size) / PAGE_SIZE
What we would like to do is
scan = slab_pages >> sc->priority
but we don't know the number of slab pages each shrinker controls, only
the objects. However say that theoretically we knew how many pages a
shrinker controlled, we'd still have to convert this to objects, which
would look like the following
scan = shrinker_pages >> sc->priority
scan_objects = (PAGE_SIZE / object_size) * scan
or written another way
scan_objects = (shrinker_pages >> sc->priority) *
(PAGE_SIZE / object_size)
which can thus be written
scan_objects = ((shrinker_pages * PAGE_SIZE) / object_size) >>
sc->priority
which is just
scan_objects = nr_objects >> sc->priority
We don't need to know exactly how many pages each shrinker represents,
it's objects are all the information we need. Making this change allows
us to place an appropriate amount of pressure on the shrinker pools for
their relative size.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1510780549-6812-1-git-send-email-josef@toxicpanda.com
Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <jbacik@fb.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Acked-by: Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
9092c71bb7