mm: disable zone_reclaim_mode by default

When it was introduced, zone_reclaim_mode made sense as NUMA distances
punished and workloads were generally partitioned to fit into a NUMA
node.  NUMA machines are now common but few of the workloads are
NUMA-aware and it's routine to see major performance degradation due to
zone_reclaim_mode being enabled but relatively few can identify the
problem.

Those that require zone_reclaim_mode are likely to be able to detect
when it needs to be enabled and tune appropriately so lets have a
sensible default for the bulk of users.

This patch (of 2):

zone_reclaim_mode causes processes to prefer reclaiming memory from
local node instead of spilling over to other nodes.  This made sense
initially when NUMA machines were almost exclusively HPC and the
workload was partitioned into nodes.  The NUMA penalties were
sufficiently high to justify reclaiming the memory.  On current machines
and workloads it is often the case that zone_reclaim_mode destroys
performance but not all users know how to detect this.  Favour the
common case and disable it by default.  Users that are sophisticated
enough to know they need zone_reclaim_mode will detect it.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Zhang Yanfei <zhangyanfei@cn.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

2 files changed, 4 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/arch/ia64/include/asm/topology.h b/arch/ia64/include/asm/topology.h
index 3202aa74e0d..6437ca21f61 100644
--- a/arch/ia64/include/asm/topology.h
+++ b/arch/ia64/include/asm/topology.h
@@ -21,7 +21,8 @@
 #define PENALTY_FOR_NODE_WITH_CPUS 255
 
 /*
- * Distance above which we begin to use zone reclaim
+ * Nodes within this distance are eligible for reclaim by zone_reclaim() when
+ * zone_reclaim_mode is enabled.
  */
 #define RECLAIM_DISTANCE 15
 
diff --git a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/topology.h b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/topology.h
index c9202151079..6c8a8c5a37a 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/topology.h
+++ b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/topology.h
@@ -9,12 +9,8 @@ struct device_node;
 #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA
 
 /*
- * Before going off node we want the VM to try and reclaim from the local
- * node. It does this if the remote distance is larger than RECLAIM_DISTANCE.
- * With the default REMOTE_DISTANCE of 20 and the default RECLAIM_DISTANCE of
- * 20, we never reclaim and go off node straight away.
- *
- * To fix this we choose a smaller value of RECLAIM_DISTANCE.
+ * If zone_reclaim_mode is enabled, a RECLAIM_DISTANCE of 10 will mean that
+ * all zones on all nodes will be eligible for zone_reclaim().
  */
 #define RECLAIM_DISTANCE 10