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Date:   Thu, 25 Mar 2021 12:50:01 +0000
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To:     Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>,
        Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
        Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@gmail.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>,
        Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@linaro.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux-Net <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Linux-NFS <linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/9 v6] Introduce a bulk order-0 page allocator with two
 in-tree users
Message-ID: <20210325125001.GW1719932@casper.infradead.org>
References: <20210325114228.27719-1-mgorman@techsingularity.net>
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In-Reply-To: <20210325114228.27719-1-mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Precedence: bulk

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 11:42:19AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> This series introduces a bulk order-0 page allocator with sunrpc and
> the network page pool being the first users. The implementation is not
> efficient as semantics needed to be ironed out first. If no other semantic
> changes are needed, it can be made more efficient.  Despite that, this
> is a performance-related for users that require multiple pages for an
> operation without multiple round-trips to the page allocator. Quoting
> the last patch for the high-speed networking use-case
> 
>             Kernel          XDP stats       CPU     pps           Delta
>             Baseline        XDP-RX CPU      total   3,771,046       n/a
>             List            XDP-RX CPU      total   3,940,242    +4.49%
>             Array           XDP-RX CPU      total   4,249,224   +12.68%
> 
> >From the SUNRPC traces of svc_alloc_arg()
> 
> 	Single page: 25.007 us per call over 532,571 calls
> 	Bulk list:    6.258 us per call over 517,034 calls
> 	Bulk array:   4.590 us per call over 517,442 calls
> 
> Both potential users in this series are corner cases (NFS and high-speed
> networks) so it is unlikely that most users will see any benefit in the
> short term. Other potential other users are batch allocations for page
> cache readahead, fault around and SLUB allocations when high-order pages
> are unavailable. It's unknown how much benefit would be seen by converting
> multiple page allocation calls to a single batch or what difference it may
> make to headline performance.

We have a third user, vmalloc(), with a 16% perf improvement.  I know the
email says 21% but that includes the 5% improvement from switching to
kvmalloc() to allocate area->pages.

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210323133948.GA10046@pc638.lan/

I don't know how many _frequent_ vmalloc users we have that will benefit
from this, but it's probably more than will benefit from improvements
to 200Gbit networking performance.