Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 3/5] mm: enlarge NUMA counters threshold size
To: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>,
        Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>,
        YASUAKI ISHIMATSU <yasu.isimatu@gmail.com>,
        Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>,
        Nikolay Borisov <nborisov@suse.com>,
        Pavel Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@oracle.com>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>,
        Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>,
        Dave <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>, Andi Kleen <andi.kleen@intel.com>,
        Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>,
        Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>,
        Ying Huang <ying.huang@intel.com>, Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>,
        Aubrey Li <aubrey.li@intel.com>, Linux MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
References: <1513665566-4465-1-git-send-email-kemi.wang@intel.com>
 <1513665566-4465-4-git-send-email-kemi.wang@intel.com>
 <20171219124045.GO2787@dhcp22.suse.cz>
 <439918f7-e8a3-c007-496c-99535cbc4582@intel.com>
 <20171220101229.GJ4831@dhcp22.suse.cz>
 <268b1b6e-ff7a-8f1a-f97c-f94e14591975@intel.com>
 <20171221081706.GA4831@dhcp22.suse.cz>
From: kemi <kemi.wang@intel.com>
Message-ID: <1fb66dfd-b64c-f705-ea27-a9f2e11729a4@intel.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2017 16:23:23 +0800
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On 2017年12月21日 16:17, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Thu 21-12-17 16:06:50, kemi wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 2017年12月20日 18:12, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>> On Wed 20-12-17 13:52:14, kemi wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 2017年12月19日 20:40, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>>>> On Tue 19-12-17 14:39:24, Kemi Wang wrote:
>>>>>> We have seen significant overhead in cache bouncing caused by NUMA counters
>>>>>> update in multi-threaded page allocation. See 'commit 1d90ca897cb0 ("mm:
>>>>>> update NUMA counter threshold size")' for more details.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This patch updates NUMA counters to a fixed size of (MAX_S16 - 2) and deals
>>>>>> with global counter update using different threshold size for node page
>>>>>> stats.
>>>>>
>>>>> Again, no numbers.
>>>>
>>>> Compare to vanilla kernel, I don't think it has performance improvement, so
>>>> I didn't post performance data here.
>>>> But, if you would like to see performance gain from enlarging threshold size
>>>> for NUMA stats (compare to the first patch), I will do that later. 
>>>
>>> Please do. I would also like to hear _why_ all counters cannot simply
>>> behave same. In other words why we cannot simply increase
>>> stat_threshold? Maybe calculate_normal_threshold needs a better scaling
>>> for larger machines.
>>>
>>
>> I will add this performance data to changelog in V3 patch series.
>>
>> Test machine: 2-sockets skylake platform (112 CPUs, 62G RAM)
>> Benchmark: page_bench03
>> Description: 112 threads do single page allocation/deallocation in parallel.
>>                before                           after
>>                                        (enlarge threshold size)       
>> CPU cycles     722                              379(-47.5%)
> 
> Please describe the numbers some more. Is this an average?

Yes

> What is the std? 

I increase the loop times to 10m, so the std is quite slow (repeat 3 times)

> Can you see any difference with a more generic workload?
> 

I didn't see obvious improvement for will-it-scale.page_fault1
Two reasons for that:
1) too long code path
2) server zone lock and lru lock contention (access to buddy system frequently) 

>> Some thinking about that:
>> a) the overhead due to cache bouncing caused by NUMA counter update in fast path 
>> severely increase with more and more CPUs cores
> 
> What is an effect on a smaller system with fewer CPUs?
> 

Several CPU cycles can be saved using single thread for that.

>> b) AFAIK, the typical usage scenario (similar at least)for which this optimization can 
>> benefit is 10/40G NIC used in high-speed data center network of cloud service providers.
> 
> I would expect those would disable the numa accounting altogether.
> 

Yes, but it is still worthy to do some optimization, isn't?