mm: only force scan in reclaim when none of the LRUs are big enough.
authorSuleiman Souhlal <suleiman@google.com>
Wed, 4 Jun 2014 23:06:44 +0000 (16:06 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Wed, 4 Jun 2014 23:53:56 +0000 (16:53 -0700)
commit6f04f48dc9c0433e2bb687f5f7f7af1aba97b04d
tree0f396e26a4804af13e9004956ec1c5b9ac18ce6e
parentc86c97ff42cd6c6d1bd29eca4dfabeaf2b7f1020
mm: only force scan in reclaim when none of the LRUs are big enough.

Prior to this change, we would decide whether to force scan a LRU during
reclaim if that LRU itself was too small for the current priority.
However, this can lead to the file LRU getting force scanned even if
there are a lot of anonymous pages we can reclaim, leading to hot file
pages getting needlessly reclaimed.

To address this, we instead only force scan when none of the reclaimable
LRUs are big enough.

Gives huge improvements with zswap.  For example, when doing -j20 kernel
build in a 500MB container with zswap enabled, runtime (in seconds) is
greatly reduced:

x without this change
+ with this change
    N           Min           Max        Median           Avg        Stddev
x   5       700.997       790.076       763.928        754.05      39.59493
+   5       141.634       197.899       155.706         161.9     21.270224
Difference at 95.0% confidence
        -592.15 +/- 46.3521
        -78.5293% +/- 6.14709%
        (Student's t, pooled s = 31.7819)

Should also give some improvements in regular (non-zswap) swap cases.

Yes, hughd found significant speedup using regular swap, with several
memcgs under pressure; and it should also be effective in the non-memcg
case, whenever one or another zone LRU is forced too small.

Signed-off-by: Suleiman Souhlal <suleiman@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Suleiman Souhlal <suleiman@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Yuanhan Liu <yuanhan.liu@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Seth Jennings <sjennings@variantweb.net>
Cc: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/vmscan.c