[PATCH v4 00/11] memcg: per cgroup dirty page accounting
Ciju Rajan K
ciju at linux.vnet.ibm.com
Tue Nov 2 12:33:15 PDT 2010
Greg Thelen wrote:
> Andrew Morton <akpm at linux-foundation.org> writes:
>
>
>> On Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:09:03 -0700
>> Greg Thelen <gthelen at google.com> wrote:
>>
>> This is cool stuff - it's been a long haul. One day we'll be
>> nearly-finished and someone will write a book telling people how to use
>> it all and lots of people will go "holy crap". I hope.
>>
>>
>>> Limiting dirty memory is like fixing the max amount of dirty (hard to reclaim)
>>> page cache used by a cgroup. So, in case of multiple cgroup writers, they will
>>> not be able to consume more than their designated share of dirty pages and will
>>> be forced to perform write-out if they cross that limit.
>>>
>>> The patches are based on a series proposed by Andrea Righi in Mar 2010.
>>>
>>> Overview:
>>> - Add page_cgroup flags to record when pages are dirty, in writeback, or nfs
>>> unstable.
>>>
>>> - Extend mem_cgroup to record the total number of pages in each of the
>>> interesting dirty states (dirty, writeback, unstable_nfs).
>>>
>>> - Add dirty parameters similar to the system-wide /proc/sys/vm/dirty_*
>>> limits to mem_cgroup. The mem_cgroup dirty parameters are accessible
>>> via cgroupfs control files.
>>>
>> Curious minds will want to know what the default values are set to and
>> how they were determined.
>>
>
> When a memcg is created, its dirty limits are set to a copy of the
> parent's limits. If the new cgroup is a top level cgroup, then it
> inherits from the system parameters (/proc/sys/vm/dirty_*).
>
>
>>> - Consider both system and per-memcg dirty limits in page writeback when
>>> deciding to queue background writeback or block for foreground writeback.
>>>
>>> Known shortcomings:
>>> - When a cgroup dirty limit is exceeded, then bdi writeback is employed to
>>> writeback dirty inodes. Bdi writeback considers inodes from any cgroup, not
>>> just inodes contributing dirty pages to the cgroup exceeding its limit.
>>>
>> yup. Some broader discussion of the implications of this shortcoming
>> is needed. I'm not sure where it would be placed, though.
>> Documentation/ for now, until you write that book.
>>
>
> Fair enough. I can add more text to Documentation/ describing the
> behavior and issue in more detail.
>
>
>>> - When memory.use_hierarchy is set, then dirty limits are disabled. This is a
>>> implementation detail.
>>>
>> So this is unintentional, and forced upon us my the present implementation?
>>
>
> Yes, this is not ideal. I chose not to address this particular issue in
> this series to keep the series smaller.
>
>
>>> An enhanced implementation is needed to check the
>>> chain of parents to ensure that no dirty limit is exceeded.
>>>
>> How important is it that this be fixed?
>>
>
> I am not sure if there is interest in hierarchical per-memcg dirty
> limits. So I don't think that this is very important to be fixed
> immediately. But the fact that it doesn't work is unexpected. It would
> be nice if it just worked. I'll look into making it work.
>
>
>> And how feasible would that fix be? A linear walk up the hierarchy
>> list? More than that?
>>
>
> I think it should be a simple matter of enhancing
> mem_cgroup_dirty_info() to walk up the hierarchy looking for the cgroup
> closest to its dirty limit. The only tricky part is that there are
> really two limits (foreground/throttling limit, and a background limit)
> that need to be considered when finding the memcg that most deserves
> inspection by balance_dirty_pages().
>
>
>>> Performance data:
>>> - A page fault microbenchmark workload was used to measure performance, which
>>> can be called in read or write mode:
>>> f = open(foo. $cpu)
>>> truncate(f, 4096)
>>> alarm(60)
>>> while (1) {
>>> p = mmap(f, 4096)
>>> if (write)
>>> *p = 1
>>> else
>>> x = *p
>>> munmap(p)
>>> }
>>>
>>> - The workload was called for several points in the patch series in different
>>> modes:
>>> - s_read is a single threaded reader
>>> - s_write is a single threaded writer
>>> - p_read is a 16 thread reader, each operating on a different file
>>> - p_write is a 16 thread writer, each operating on a different file
>>>
>>> - Measurements were collected on a 16 core non-numa system using "perf stat
>>> --repeat 3". The -a option was used for parallel (p_*) runs.
>>>
>>> - All numbers are page fault rate (M/sec). Higher is better.
>>>
>>> - To compare the performance of a kernel without non-memcg compare the first and
>>> last rows, neither has memcg configured. The first row does not include any
>>> of these memcg patches.
>>>
>>> - To compare the performance of using memcg dirty limits, compare the baseline
>>> (2nd row titled "w/ memcg") with the the code and memcg enabled (2nd to last
>>> row titled "all patches").
>>>
>>> root_cgroup child_cgroup
>>> s_read s_write p_read p_write s_read s_write p_read p_write
>>> mmotm w/o memcg 0.428 0.390 0.429 0.388
>>> mmotm w/ memcg 0.411 0.378 0.391 0.362 0.412 0.377 0.385 0.363
>>> all patches 0.384 0.360 0.370 0.348 0.381 0.363 0.368 0.347
>>> all patches 0.431 0.402 0.427 0.395
>>> w/o memcg
>>>
>> afaict this benchmark has demonstrated that the changes do not cause an
>> appreciable performance regression in terms of CPU loading, yes?
>>
>
> Using the mmap() workload, which is a fault heavy workload...
>
> When memcg is not configured, there is no significant performance
> change. Depending on the workload the performance is between 0%..3%
> faster. This is likely workload noise.
>
> When memcg is configured, the performance drops between 4% and 8%. Some
> of this might be noise, but it is expected that memcg faults will get
> slower because there's more code in the fault path.
>
>
>> Can we come up with any tests which demonstrate the _benefits_ of the
>> feature?
>>
>
> Here is a test script that shows a situation where memcg dirty limits
> are beneficial. The script runs two programs: a dirty page background
> antagonist (dd) and an interactive foreground process (tar). If the
> scripts argument is false, then both processes are run together in the
> root cgroup sharing system-wide dirty memory in classic fashion. If the
> script is given a true argument, then a cgroup is used to contain dd
> dirty page consumption.
>
> ---[start]---
> #!/bin/bash
> # dirty.sh - dirty limit performance test script
> echo use_cgroup: $1
>
> # start antagonist
> if $1; then # if using cgroup to contain 'dd'...
> mkdir /dev/cgroup/A
> echo 400M > /dev/cgroup/A/memory.dirty_limit_in_bytes
> (echo $BASHPID > /dev/cgroup/A/tasks; dd if=/dev/zero of=big.file
> count=10k bs=1M) &
> else
> dd if=/dev/zero of=big.file count=10k bs=1M &
> fi
>
> sleep 10
>
> time tar -xzf linux-2.6.36.tar.gz
> wait
> $1 && rmdir /dev/cgroup/A
> ---[end]---
>
> dirty.sh false : dd 59.7MB/s stddev 7.442%, tar 12.2s stddev 25.720%
> # both in root_cgroup
> dirty.sh true : dd 55.4MB/s stddev 0.958%, tar 3.8s stddev 0.250%
> # tar in root_cgroup, dd in cgroup
>
Reviewed-by: Ciju Rajan K <ciju at linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Ciju Rajan K <ciju at linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> The cgroup reserved dirty memory resources for the rest of the system
> processes (tar in this case). The tar process had faster and more
> predictable performance. memcg dirty ratios might be useful to serve
> different task classes (interactive vs batch). A past discussion
> touched on this: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/5/20/136
>
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