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Date:   Tue, 3 Oct 2023 09:13:09 -0400
From:   Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
To:     Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>,
        Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>,
        Muchun Song <muchun.song@linux.dev>,
        Michal =?iso-8859-1?Q?Koutn=FD?= <mkoutny@suse.com>,
        linux-mm@kvack.org, cgroups@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] mm: memcg: normalize the value passed into
 memcg_rstat_updated()
Message-ID: <20231003131309.GD17012@cmpxchg.org>
References: <20230922175741.635002-1-yosryahmed@google.com>
 <20230922175741.635002-3-yosryahmed@google.com>
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On Fri, Sep 22, 2023 at 05:57:40PM +0000, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> memcg_rstat_updated() uses the value of the state update to keep track
> of the magnitude of pending updates, so that we only do a stats flush
> when it's worth the work. Most values passed into memcg_rstat_updated()
> are in pages, however, a few of them are actually in bytes or KBs.
> 
> To put this into perspective, a 512 byte slab allocation today would
> look the same as allocating 512 pages. This may result in premature
> flushes, which means unnecessary work and latency.

Yikes.

I'm somewhat less concerned about the performance as I am about the
variance in flushing cost that could be quite difficult to pinpoint.
IMO this is a correctness fix and a code cleanup, not a performance
thing.

> Normalize all the state values passed into memcg_rstat_updated() to
> pages. Round up non-zero sub-page to 1 page, because
> memcg_rstat_updated() ignores 0 page updates.
> 
> Fixes: 5b3be698a872 ("memcg: better bounds on the memcg stats updates")
> Signed-off-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>