On Fri, 4 Mar 2022 18:40:40 +0000 Shakeel Butt shakeelb@google.com wrote:
Daniel Dao has reported [1] a regression on workloads that may trigger a lot of refaults (anon and file). The underlying issue is that flushing rstat is expensive. Although rstat flush are batched with (nr_cpus * MEMCG_BATCH) stat updates, it seems like there are workloads which genuinely do stat updates larger than batch value within short amount of time. Since the rstat flush can happen in the performance critical codepaths like page faults, such workload can suffer greatly.
This patch fixes this regression by making the rstat flushing conditional in the performance critical codepaths. More specifically, the kernel relies on the async periodic rstat flusher to flush the stats and only if the periodic flusher is delayed by more than twice the amount of its normal time window then the kernel allows rstat flushing from the performance critical codepaths.
Now the question: what are the side-effects of this change? The worst that can happen is the refault codepath will see 4sec old lruvec stats and may cause false (or missed) activations of the refaulted page which may under-or-overestimate the workingset size. Though that is not very concerning as the kernel can already miss or do false activations.
There are two more codepaths whose flushing behavior is not changed by this patch and we may need to come to them in future. One is the writeback stats used by dirty throttling and second is the deactivation heuristic in the reclaim. For now keeping an eye on them and if there is report of regression due to these codepaths, we will reevaluate then.
--- a/mm/memcontrol.c +++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
...
@@ -648,10 +652,16 @@ void mem_cgroup_flush_stats(void) __mem_cgroup_flush_stats(); } +void mem_cgroup_flush_stats_delayed(void) +{
- if (rstat_flush_time && time_after64(jiffies_64, flush_next_time))
rstat_flush_time isn't defined for me and my googling indicates this is the first time the symbol has been used in the history of the world. I'm stumped.
mem_cgroup_flush_stats();+}
...