From 08951e545918c1594434d000d88a7793e2452a9b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mel Gorman Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 15:39:36 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] mm: vmscan: correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark. This is expected behaviour. Unfortunately, if the highest zone is small, a problem occurs. This seems to happen most with recent sandybridge laptops but it's probably a co-incidence as some of these laptops just happen to have a small Normal zone. The reproduction case is almost always during copying large files that kswapd pegs at 100% CPU until the file is deleted or cache is dropped. The problem is mostly down to sleeping_prematurely() keeping kswapd awake when the highest zone is small and unreclaimable and compounded by the fact we shrink slabs even when not shrinking zones causing a lot of time to be spent in shrinkers and a lot of memory to be reclaimed. Patch 1 corrects sleeping_prematurely to check the zones matching the classzone_idx instead of all zones. Patch 2 avoids shrinking slab when we are not shrinking a zone. Patch 3 notes that sleeping_prematurely is checking lower zones against a high classzone which is not what allocators or balance_pgdat() is doing leading to an artifical belief that kswapd should be still awake. Patch 4 notes that when balance_pgdat() gives up on a high zone that the decision is not communicated to sleeping_prematurely() This problem affects 2.6.38.8 for certain and is expected to affect 2.6.39 and 3.0-rc4 as well. If accepted, they need to go to -stable to be picked up by distros and this series is against 3.0-rc4. I've cc'd people that reported similar problems recently to see if they still suffer from the problem and if this fixes it. This patch: correct the check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely() During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark. This is expected behaviour. A problem occurs if the highest zone is small. balance_pgdat() only considers unreclaimable zones when priority is DEF_PRIORITY but sleeping_prematurely considers all zones. It's possible for this sequence to occur 1. kswapd wakes up and enters balance_pgdat() 2. At DEF_PRIORITY, marks highest zone unreclaimable 3. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, ignores highest zone setting end_zone 4. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, calls shrink_slab freeing memory from highest zone, clearing all_unreclaimable. Highest zone is still unbalanced 5. kswapd returns and calls sleeping_prematurely 6. sleeping_prematurely looks at *all* zones, not just the ones being considered by balance_pgdat. The highest small zone has all_unreclaimable cleared but the zone is not balanced. all_zones_ok is false so kswapd stays awake This patch corrects the behaviour of sleeping_prematurely to check the zones balance_pgdat() checked. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Reported-by: Pádraig Brady Tested-by: Pádraig Brady Tested-by: Andrew Lutomirski Acked-by: Rik van Riel Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/vmscan.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index 4f49535d4cd..04c49fe781f 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -2326,7 +2326,7 @@ static bool sleeping_prematurely(pg_data_t *pgdat, int order, long remaining, return true; /* Check the watermark levels */ - for (i = 0; i < pgdat->nr_zones; i++) { + for (i = 0; i <= classzone_idx; i++) { struct zone *zone = pgdat->node_zones + i; if (!populated_zone(zone)) -- 2.11.4.GIT