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authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>2009-06-16 15:33:20 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-06-16 19:47:45 -0700
commit90afa5de6f3fa89a733861e843377302479fcf7e (patch)
tree2870878fa3361c27551b5a18c4732073ae1432bd /mm/vmscan.c
parent84a892456046921a40646114deed65e2df93a1bc (diff)
vmscan: properly account for the number of page cache pages zone_reclaim() can reclaim
A bug was brought to my attention against a distro kernel but it affects mainline and I believe problems like this have been reported in various guises on the mailing lists although I don't have specific examples at the moment. The reported problem was that malloc() stalled for a long time (minutes in some cases) if a large tmpfs mount was occupying a large percentage of memory overall. The pages did not get cleaned or reclaimed by zone_reclaim() because the zone_reclaim_mode was unsuitable, but the lists are uselessly scanned frequencly making the CPU spin at near 100%. This patchset intends to address that bug and bring the behaviour of zone_reclaim() more in line with expectations which were noticed during investigation. It is based on top of mmotm and takes advantage of Kosaki's work with respect to zone_reclaim(). Patch 1 fixes the heuristics that zone_reclaim() uses to determine if the scan should go ahead. The broken heuristic is what was causing the malloc() stall as it uselessly scanned the LRU constantly. Currently, zone_reclaim is assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 and historically it could not deal with tmpfs pages at all. This fixes up the heuristic so that an unnecessary scan is more likely to be correctly avoided. Patch 2 notes that zone_reclaim() returning a failure automatically means the zone is marked full. This is not always true. It could have failed because the GFP mask or zone_reclaim_mode were unsuitable. Patch 3 introduces a counter zreclaim_failed that will increment each time the zone_reclaim scan-avoidance heuristics fail. If that counter is rapidly increasing, then zone_reclaim_mode should be set to 0 as a temporarily resolution and a bug reported because the scan-avoidance heuristic is still broken. This patch: On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that is a more targetted form of direct reclaim. On machines with large NUMA distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not being met. There is a heuristic that determines if the scan is worthwhile but the problem is that the heuristic is not being properly applied and is basically assuming zone_reclaim_mode is 1 if it is enabled. The lack of proper detection can manfiest as high CPU usage as the LRU list is scanned uselessly. Historically, once enabled it was depending on NR_FILE_PAGES which may include swapcache pages that the reclaim_mode cannot deal with. Patch vmscan-change-the-number-of-the-unmapped-files-in-zone-reclaim.patch by Kosaki Motohiro noted that zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_PAGES) included pages that were not file-backed such as swapcache and made a calculation based on the inactive, active and mapped files. This is far superior when zone_reclaim==1 but if RECLAIM_SWAP is set, then NR_FILE_PAGES is a reasonable starting figure. This patch alters how zone_reclaim() works out how many pages it might be able to reclaim given the current reclaim_mode. If RECLAIM_SWAP is set in the reclaim_mode it will either consider NR_FILE_PAGES as potential candidates or else use NR_{IN}ACTIVE}_PAGES-NR_FILE_MAPPED to discount swapcache and other non-file-backed pages. If RECLAIM_WRITE is not set, then NR_FILE_DIRTY number of pages are not candidates. If RECLAIM_SWAP is not set, then NR_FILE_MAPPED are not. [kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: Estimate unmapped pages minus tmpfs pages] [fengguang.wu@intel.com: Fix underflow problem in Kosaki's estimate] Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/vmscan.c')
-rw-r--r--mm/vmscan.c52
1 files changed, 45 insertions, 7 deletions
diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 057e44b97aa..79a98d98ed3 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2356,6 +2356,48 @@ int sysctl_min_unmapped_ratio = 1;
*/
int sysctl_min_slab_ratio = 5;
+static inline unsigned long zone_unmapped_file_pages(struct zone *zone)
+{
+ unsigned long file_mapped = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_MAPPED);
+ unsigned long file_lru = zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_FILE) +
+ zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_FILE);
+
+ /*
+ * It's possible for there to be more file mapped pages than
+ * accounted for by the pages on the file LRU lists because
+ * tmpfs pages accounted for as ANON can also be FILE_MAPPED
+ */
+ return (file_lru > file_mapped) ? (file_lru - file_mapped) : 0;
+}
+
+/* Work out how many page cache pages we can reclaim in this reclaim_mode */
+static long zone_pagecache_reclaimable(struct zone *zone)
+{
+ long nr_pagecache_reclaimable;
+ long delta = 0;
+
+ /*
+ * If RECLAIM_SWAP is set, then all file pages are considered
+ * potentially reclaimable. Otherwise, we have to worry about
+ * pages like swapcache and zone_unmapped_file_pages() provides
+ * a better estimate
+ */
+ if (zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_SWAP)
+ nr_pagecache_reclaimable = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_PAGES);
+ else
+ nr_pagecache_reclaimable = zone_unmapped_file_pages(zone);
+
+ /* If we can't clean pages, remove dirty pages from consideration */
+ if (!(zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_WRITE))
+ delta += zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_DIRTY);
+
+ /* Watch for any possible underflows due to delta */
+ if (unlikely(delta > nr_pagecache_reclaimable))
+ delta = nr_pagecache_reclaimable;
+
+ return nr_pagecache_reclaimable - delta;
+}
+
/*
* Try to free up some pages from this zone through reclaim.
*/
@@ -2390,9 +2432,7 @@ static int __zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order)
reclaim_state.reclaimed_slab = 0;
p->reclaim_state = &reclaim_state;
- if (zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_PAGES) -
- zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_MAPPED) >
- zone->min_unmapped_pages) {
+ if (zone_pagecache_reclaimable(zone) > zone->min_unmapped_pages) {
/*
* Free memory by calling shrink zone with increasing
* priorities until we have enough memory freed.
@@ -2450,10 +2490,8 @@ int zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order)
* if less than a specified percentage of the zone is used by
* unmapped file backed pages.
*/
- if (zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_PAGES) -
- zone_page_state(zone, NR_FILE_MAPPED) <= zone->min_unmapped_pages
- && zone_page_state(zone, NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE)
- <= zone->min_slab_pages)
+ if (zone_pagecache_reclaimable(zone) <= zone->min_unmapped_pages &&
+ zone_page_state(zone, NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE) <= zone->min_slab_pages)
return 0;
if (zone_is_all_unreclaimable(zone))