diff mbox series

[2/3] mm: memcontrol: do not try to do swap when force empty

Message ID 1546459533-36247-3-git-send-email-yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com (mailing list archive)
State New, archived
Headers show
Series [1/3] doc: memcontrol: fix the obsolete content about force empty | expand

Commit Message

Yang Shi Jan. 2, 2019, 8:05 p.m. UTC
The typical usecase of force empty is to try to reclaim as much as
possible memory before offlining a memcg.  Since there should be no
attached tasks to offlining memcg, the tasks anonymous pages would have
already been freed or uncharged.  Even though anonymous pages get
swapped out, but they still get charged to swap space.  So, it sounds
pointless to do swap for force empty.

I tried to dig into the history of this, it was introduced by
commit 8c7c6e34a125 ("memcg: mem+swap controller core"), but there is
not any clue about why it was done so at the first place.

The below simple test script shows slight file cache reclaim improvement
when swap is on.

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test
echo 30 > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test/memory.swappiness
echo $$ >/sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test/cgroup.procs
cat /proc/meminfo | grep ^Cached|awk -F" " '{print $2}'
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test bs=1M count=1024
ping localhost > /dev/null &
echo 1 > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test/memory.force_empty
killall ping
echo $$ >/sys/fs/cgroup/memory/cgroup.procs
cat /proc/meminfo | grep ^Cached|awk -F" " '{print $2}'
rmdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/test
cat /proc/meminfo | grep ^Cached|awk -F" " '{print $2}'

The number of page cache is:
			w/o		w/
before force empty    1088792        1088784
after force empty     41492          39428
reclaimed	      1047300        1049356

Without doing swap, force empty can reclaim 2MB more memory in 1GB page
cache.

Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com>
---
 mm/memcontrol.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Comments

Shakeel Butt Jan. 2, 2019, 9:45 p.m. UTC | #1
On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 12:06 PM Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>
> The typical usecase of force empty is to try to reclaim as much as
> possible memory before offlining a memcg.  Since there should be no
> attached tasks to offlining memcg, the tasks anonymous pages would have
> already been freed or uncharged.

Anon pages can come from tmpfs files as well.

> Even though anonymous pages get
> swapped out, but they still get charged to swap space.  So, it sounds
> pointless to do swap for force empty.
>

I understand that force_empty is typically used before rmdir'ing a
memcg but it might be used differently by some users. We use this
interface to test memory reclaim behavior (anon and file).

Anyways, I am not against changing the behavior, we can adapt
internally but there might be other users using this interface
differently.

thanks,
Shakeel
Yang Shi Jan. 3, 2019, 4:56 p.m. UTC | #2
On 1/2/19 1:45 PM, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 12:06 PM Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>> The typical usecase of force empty is to try to reclaim as much as
>> possible memory before offlining a memcg.  Since there should be no
>> attached tasks to offlining memcg, the tasks anonymous pages would have
>> already been freed or uncharged.
> Anon pages can come from tmpfs files as well.

Yes, but they are charged to swap space as regular anon pages.

>
>> Even though anonymous pages get
>> swapped out, but they still get charged to swap space.  So, it sounds
>> pointless to do swap for force empty.
>>
> I understand that force_empty is typically used before rmdir'ing a
> memcg but it might be used differently by some users. We use this
> interface to test memory reclaim behavior (anon and file).

Thanks for sharing your usecase. So, you uses this for test only?

>
> Anyways, I am not against changing the behavior, we can adapt
> internally but there might be other users using this interface
> differently.

Thanks.

Yang

>
> thanks,
> Shakeel
Shakeel Butt Jan. 3, 2019, 5:03 p.m. UTC | #3
On Thu, Jan 3, 2019 at 8:57 AM Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 1/2/19 1:45 PM, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 12:06 PM Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
> >> The typical usecase of force empty is to try to reclaim as much as
> >> possible memory before offlining a memcg.  Since there should be no
> >> attached tasks to offlining memcg, the tasks anonymous pages would have
> >> already been freed or uncharged.
> > Anon pages can come from tmpfs files as well.
>
> Yes, but they are charged to swap space as regular anon pages.
>

The point was the lifetime of tmpfs anon pages are not tied to any
task. Even though there aren't any task attached to a memcg, the tmpfs
anon pages will remain charged. Other than that, the old anon pages of
a task which have migrated away might still be charged to the old
memcg (if move_charge_at_immigrate is not set).

> >
> >> Even though anonymous pages get
> >> swapped out, but they still get charged to swap space.  So, it sounds
> >> pointless to do swap for force empty.
> >>
> > I understand that force_empty is typically used before rmdir'ing a
> > memcg but it might be used differently by some users. We use this
> > interface to test memory reclaim behavior (anon and file).
>
> Thanks for sharing your usecase. So, you uses this for test only?
>

Yes.

Shakeel
Yang Shi Jan. 3, 2019, 6:19 p.m. UTC | #4
On 1/3/19 9:03 AM, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 3, 2019 at 8:57 AM Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 1/2/19 1:45 PM, Shakeel Butt wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 12:06 PM Yang Shi <yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com> wrote:
>>>> The typical usecase of force empty is to try to reclaim as much as
>>>> possible memory before offlining a memcg.  Since there should be no
>>>> attached tasks to offlining memcg, the tasks anonymous pages would have
>>>> already been freed or uncharged.
>>> Anon pages can come from tmpfs files as well.
>> Yes, but they are charged to swap space as regular anon pages.
>>
> The point was the lifetime of tmpfs anon pages are not tied to any
> task. Even though there aren't any task attached to a memcg, the tmpfs
> anon pages will remain charged. Other than that, the old anon pages of
> a task which have migrated away might still be charged to the old
> memcg (if move_charge_at_immigrate is not set).

Yes, my understanding is even though they are swapped out but they are 
still charged to memsw for cgroupv1. force_empty is supposed to reclaim 
as much as possible memory, here I'm supposed "reclaim" also means 
"uncharge".

Even though the anon pages are still charged to the old memcg, it will 
be moved the new memcg when the old one is deleted, or the pages will be 
just released if the task is killed.

So, IMHO, I don't see the point why swapping anon pages when doing 
force_empty.

Thanks,
Yang

>>>> Even though anonymous pages get
>>>> swapped out, but they still get charged to swap space.  So, it sounds
>>>> pointless to do swap for force empty.
>>>>
>>> I understand that force_empty is typically used before rmdir'ing a
>>> memcg but it might be used differently by some users. We use this
>>> interface to test memory reclaim behavior (anon and file).
>> Thanks for sharing your usecase. So, you uses this for test only?
>>
> Yes.
>
> Shakeel
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
index 6e1469b..bbf39b5 100644
--- a/mm/memcontrol.c
+++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
@@ -2872,7 +2872,7 @@  static int mem_cgroup_force_empty(struct mem_cgroup *memcg)
 			return -EINTR;
 
 		progress = try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages(memcg, 1,
-							GFP_KERNEL, true);
+							GFP_KERNEL, false);
 		if (!progress) {
 			nr_retries--;
 			/* maybe some writeback is necessary */