[PATCH] memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup
Optimize the critical zonelist scanning for free pages in the kernel memory
allocator by caching the zones that were found to be full recently, and
skipping them.
Remembers the zones in a zonelist that were short of free memory in the
last second. And it stashes a zone-to-node table in the zonelist struct,
to optimize that conversion (minimize its cache footprint.)
Recent changes:
This differs in a significant way from a similar patch that I
posted a week ago. Now, instead of having a nodemask_t of
recently full nodes, I have a bitmask of recently full zones.
This solves a problem that last weeks patch had, which on
systems with multiple zones per node (such as DMA zone) would
take seeing any of these zones full as meaning that all zones
on that node were full.
Also I changed names - from "zonelist faster" to "zonelist cache",
as that seemed to better convey what we're doing here - caching
some of the key zonelist state (for faster access.)
See below for some performance benchmark results. After all that
discussion with David on why I didn't need them, I went and got
some ;). I wanted to verify that I had not hurt the normal case
of memory allocation noticeably. At least for my one little
microbenchmark, I found (1) the normal case wasn't affected, and
(2) workloads that forced scanning across multiple nodes for
memory improved up to 10% fewer System CPU cycles and lower
elapsed clock time ('sys' and 'real'). Good. See details, below.
I didn't have the logic in get_page_from_freelist() for various
full nodes and zone reclaim failures correct. That should be
fixed up now - notice the new goto labels zonelist_scan,
this_zone_full, and try_next_zone, in get_page_from_freelist().
There are two reasons I persued this alternative, over some earlier
proposals that would have focused on optimizing the fake numa
emulation case by caching the last useful zone:
1) Contrary to what I said before, we (SGI, on large ia64 sn2 systems)
have seen real customer loads where the cost to scan the zonelist
was a problem, due to many nodes being full of memory before
we got to a node we could use. Or at least, I think we have.
This was related to me by another engineer, based on experiences
from some time past. So this is not guaranteed. Most likely, though.
The following approach should help such real numa systems just as
much as it helps fake numa systems, or any combination thereof.
2) The effort to distinguish fake from real numa, using node_distance,
so that we could cache a fake numa node and optimize choosing
it over equivalent distance fake nodes, while continuing to
properly scan all real nodes in distance order, was going to
require a nasty blob of zonelist and node distance munging.
The following approach has no new dependency on node distances or
zone sorting.
See comment in the patch below for a description of what it actually does.
Technical details of note (or controversy):
- See the use of "zlc_active" and "did_zlc_setup" below, to delay
adding any work for this new mechanism until we've looked at the
first zone in zonelist. I figured the odds of the first zone
having the memory we needed were high enough that we should just
look there, first, then get fancy only if we need to keep looking.
- Some odd hackery was needed to add items to struct zonelist, while
not tripping up the custom zonelists built by the mm/mempolicy.c
code for MPOL_BIND. My usual wordy comments below explain this.
Search for "MPOL_BIND".
- Some per-node data in the struct zonelist is now modified frequently,
with no locking. Multiple CPU cores on a node could hit and mangle
this data. The theory is that this is just performance hint data,
and the memory allocator will work just fine despite any such mangling.
The fields at risk are the struct 'zonelist_cache' fields 'fullzones'
(a bitmask) and 'last_full_zap' (unsigned long jiffies). It should
all be self correcting after at most a one second delay.
- This still does a linear scan of the same lengths as before. All
I've optimized is making the scan faster, not algorithmically
shorter. It is now able to scan a compact array of 'unsigned
short' in the case of many full nodes, so one cache line should
cover quite a few nodes, rather than each node hitting another
one or two new and distinct cache lines.
- If both Andi and Nick don't find this too complicated, I will be
(pleasantly) flabbergasted.
- I removed the comment claiming we only use one cachline's worth of
zonelist. We seem, at least in the fake numa case, to have put the
lie to that claim.
- I pay no attention to the various watermarks and such in this performance
hint. A node could be marked full for one watermark, and then skipped
over when searching for a page using a different watermark. I think
that's actually quite ok, as it will tend to slightly increase the
spreading of memory over other nodes, away from a memory stressed node.
===============
Performance - some benchmark results and analysis:
This benchmark runs a memory hog program that uses multiple
threads to touch alot of memory as quickly as it can.
Multiple runs were made, touching 12, 38, 64 or 90 GBytes out of
the total 96 GBytes on the system, and using 1, 19, 37, or 55
threads (on a 56 CPU system.) System, user and real (elapsed)
timings were recorded for each run, shown in units of seconds,
in the table below.
Two kernels were tested - 2.6.18-mm3 and the same kernel with
this zonelist caching patch added. The table also shows the
percentage improvement the zonelist caching sys time is over
(lower than) the stock *-mm kernel.
number 2.6.18-mm3 zonelist-cache delta (< 0 good) percent
GBs N ------------ -------------- ---------------- systime
mem threads sys user real sys user real sys user real better
12 1 153 24 177 151 24 176 -2 0 -1 1%
12 19 99 22 8 99 22 8 0 0 0 0%
12 37 111 25 6 112 25 6 1 0 0 -0%
12 55 115 25 5 110 23 5 -5 -2 0 4%
38 1 502 74 576 497 73 570 -5 -1 -6 0%
38 19 426 78 48 373 76 39 -53 -2 -9 12%
38 37 544 83 36 547 82 36 3 -1 0 -0%
38 55 501 77 23 511 80 24 10 3 1 -1%
64 1 917 125 1042 890 124 1014 -27 -1 -28 2%
64 19 1118 138 119 965 141 103 -153 3 -16 13%
64 37 1202 151 94 1136 150 81 -66 -1 -13 5%
64 55 1118 141 61 1072 140 58 -46 -1 -3 4%
90 1 1342 177 1519 1275 174 1450 -67 -3 -69 4%
90 19 2392 199 192 2116 189 176 -276 -10 -16 11%
90 37 3313 238 175 2972 225 145 -341 -13 -30 10%
90 55 1948 210 104 1843 213 100 -105 3 -4 5%
Notes:
1) This test ran a memory hog program that started a specified number N of
threads, and had each thread allocate and touch 1/N'th of
the total memory to be used in the test run in a single loop,
writing a constant word to memory, one store every 4096 bytes.
Watching this test during some earlier trial runs, I would see
each of these threads sit down on one CPU and stay there, for
the remainder of the pass, a different CPU for each thread.
2) The 'real' column is not comparable to the 'sys' or 'user' columns.
The 'real' column is seconds wall clock time elapsed, from beginning
to end of that test pass. The 'sys' and 'user' columns are total
CPU seconds spent on that test pass. For a 19 thread test run,
for example, the sum of 'sys' and 'user' could be up to 19 times the
number of 'real' elapsed wall clock seconds.
3) Tests were run on a fresh, single-user boot, to minimize the amount
of memory already in use at the start of the test, and to minimize
the amount of background activity that might interfere.
4) Tests were done on a 56 CPU, 28 Node system with 96 GBytes of RAM.
5) Notice that the 'real' time gets large for the single thread runs, even
though the measured 'sys' and 'user' times are modest. I'm not sure what
that means - probably something to do with it being slow for one thread to
be accessing memory along ways away. Perhaps the fake numa system, running
ostensibly the same workload, would not show this substantial degradation
of 'real' time for one thread on many nodes -- lets hope not.
6) The high thread count passes (one thread per CPU - on 55 of 56 CPUs)
ran quite efficiently, as one might expect. Each pair of threads needed
to allocate and touch the memory on the node the two threads shared, a
pleasantly parallizable workload.
7) The intermediate thread count passes, when asking for alot of memory forcing
them to go to a few neighboring nodes, improved the most with this zonelist
caching patch.
Conclusions:
* This zonelist cache patch probably makes little difference one way or the
other for most workloads on real numa hardware, if those workloads avoid
heavy off node allocations.
* For memory intensive workloads requiring substantial off-node allocations
on real numa hardware, this patch improves both kernel and elapsed timings
up to ten per-cent.
* For fake numa systems, I'm optimistic, but will have to leave that up to
Rohit Seth to actually test (once I get him a 2.6.18 backport.)
Signed-off-by: 
Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: Rohit Seth <rohitseth@google.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@cs.washington.edu>
Cc: Paul Menage <menage@google.com>
Signed-off-by: 
Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: 
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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