[Devel] Re: RSS controller v2 Test results (lmbench )

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 09:37 +0530, Balbir Singh wrote:
>> oops! I wonder if AIM7 creates too many processes and exhausts all
>> memory. I've seen a case where during an upgrade of my tetex on my
>> laptop, the setup process failed and continued to fork processes
>> filling up 4GB of swap.

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:53:34AM -0400, Lee Schermerhorn wrote:
> Jumping in late, I just want to note that in our investigations, when
> AIM7 gets into this situation [non-responsive system], it's because all
> cpus are in reclaim, spinning on an anon_vma spin lock.  AIM7 forks [10s
> of] thousands of children from a single parent, resultings in thousands
> of vmas on the anon_vma list.  shrink_inactive_list() must walk this
> list twice [page_referenced() and try_to_unmap()] under spin_lock for
> each anon page.  

I wonder how far out RCU'ing the anon_vma lock is.


On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:53:34AM -0400, Lee Schermerhorn wrote:
> [Aside:  Just last week, I encountered a similar situation on the
> i_mmap_lock for page cache pages running a 1200 user Oracle/OLTP run on
> a largish ia64 system.  Left the system spitting out "soft lockup"
> messages/stack dumps overnight.  Still spitting the next day, so I
> decided to reboot.]
> I have a patch that turns the anon_vma lock into a reader/writer lock
> that alleviates the problem somewhat, but with 10s of thousands of vmas
> on the lists, system still can't swap enough memory fast enough to
> recover.

Oh dear. Some algorithmic voodoo like virtually clustered scanning may
be in order in addition to anon_vma lock RCU'ing/etc.


On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:53:34AM -0400, Lee Schermerhorn wrote:
> We've run some AIM7 tests with Rik's "split lru list" patch, both with
> and without the anon_vma reader/writer lock patch.  We'll be posting
> results later this week.  Quick summary:  with Rik's patch, AIM
> performance tanks earlier, as the system starts swapping earlier.
> However, system remains responsive to shell input.  More into to follow.

I'm not sure where policy comes into this.


-- wli