Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 23.128.96.18 as permitted sender) client-ip=23.128.96.18;
Date:   Tue, 18 Aug 2020 10:27:37 +0100
From:   Chris Down <chris@chrisdown.name>
To:     peterz@infradead.org
Cc:     Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>,
        Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>,
        Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@redhat.com>,
        Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-doc@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, cgroups@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/8] memcg: Enable fine-grained per process memory
 control
Message-ID: <20200818092737.GA148695@chrisdown.name>
References: <20200817140831.30260-1-longman@redhat.com>
 <20200818091453.GL2674@hirez.programming.kicks-ass.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20200818091453.GL2674@hirez.programming.kicks-ass.net>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.14.6 (2020-07-11)
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Precedence: bulk

peterz@infradead.org writes:
>On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 10:08:23AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
>> Memory controller can be used to control and limit the amount of
>> physical memory used by a task. When a limit is set in "memory.high" in
>> a v2 non-root memory cgroup, the memory controller will try to reclaim
>> memory if the limit has been exceeded. Normally, that will be enough
>> to keep the physical memory consumption of tasks in the memory cgroup
>> to be around or below the "memory.high" limit.
>>
>> Sometimes, memory reclaim may not be able to recover memory in a rate
>> that can catch up to the physical memory allocation rate. In this case,
>> the physical memory consumption will keep on increasing.
>
>Then slow down the allocator? That's what we do for dirty pages too, we
>slow down the dirtier when we run against the limits.

We already do that since v5.4. I'm wondering whether Waiman's customer is just 
running with a too-old kernel without 0e4b01df865 ("mm, memcg: throttle 
allocators when failing reclaim over memory.high") backported.