page_alloc.c

Patch series "Separate NUMA statistics from zone statistics", v2.

Each page allocation updates a set of per-zone statistics with a call to
zone_statistics().  As discussed in 2017 MM summit, these are a
substantial source of overhead in the page allocator and are very rarely
consumed.  This significant overhead in cache bouncing caused by zone
counters (NUMA associated counters) update in parallel in multi-threaded
page allocation (pointed out by Dave Hansen).

A link to the MM summit slides:
  http://people.netfilter.org/hawk/presentations/MM-summit2017/MM-summit2017-JesperBrouer.pdf

To mitigate this overhead, this patchset separates NUMA statistics from
zone statistics framework, and update NUMA counter threshold to a fixed
size of MAX_U16 - 2, as a small threshold greatly increases the update
frequency of the global counter from local per cpu counter (suggested by
Ying Huang).  The rationality is that these statistics counters don't
need to be read often, unlike other VM counters, so it's not a problem
to use a large threshold and make readers more expensive.

With this patchset, we see 31.3% drop of CPU cycles(537-->369, see
below) for per single page allocation and reclaim on Jesper's
page_bench03 benchmark.  Meanwhile, this patchset keeps the same style
of virtual memory statistics with little end-user-visible effects (only
move the numa stats to show behind zone page stats, see the first patch
for details).

I did an experiment of single page allocation and reclaim concurrently
using Jesper's page_bench03 benchmark on a 2-Socket Broadwell-based
server (88 processors with 126G memory) with different size of threshold
of pcp counter.

Benchmark provided by Jesper D Brouer(increase loop times to 10000000):
  https://github.com/netoptimizer/prototype-kernel/tree/master/kernel/mm/bench

   Threshold   CPU cycles    Throughput(88 threads)
      32        799         241760478
      64        640         301628829
      125       537         358906028 <==> system by default
      256       468         412397590
      512       428         450550704
      4096      399         482520943
      20000     394         489009617
      30000     395         488017817
      65533     369(-31.3%) 521661345(+45.3%) <==> with this patchset
      N/A       342(-36.3%) 562900157(+56.8%) <==> disable zone_statistics

This patch (of 3):

In this patch, NUMA statistics is separated from zone statistics
framework, all the call sites of NUMA stats are changed to use
numa-stats-specific functions, it does not have any functionality change
except that the number of NUMA stats is shown behind zone page stats
when users *read* the zone info.

E.g. cat /proc/zoneinfo
    ***Base***                           ***With this patch***
nr_free_pages 3976                         nr_free_pages 3976
nr_zone_inactive_anon 0                    nr_zone_inactive_anon 0
nr_zone_active_anon 0                      nr_zone_active_anon 0
nr_zone_inactive_file 0                    nr_zone_inactive_file 0
nr_zone_active_file 0                      nr_zone_active_file 0
nr_zone_unevictable 0                      nr_zone_unevictable 0
nr_zone_write_pending 0                    nr_zone_write_pending 0
nr_mlock     0                             nr_mlock     0
nr_page_table_pages 0                      nr_page_table_pages 0
nr_kernel_stack 0                          nr_kernel_stack 0
nr_bounce    0                             nr_bounce    0
nr_zspages   0                             nr_zspages   0
numa_hit 0                                *nr_free_cma  0*
numa_miss 0                                numa_hit     0
numa_foreign 0                             numa_miss    0
numa_interleave 0                          numa_foreign 0
numa_local   0                             numa_interleave 0
numa_other   0                             numa_local   0
*nr_free_cma 0*                            numa_other 0
    ...                                        ...
vm stats threshold: 10                     vm stats threshold: 10
    ...                                        ...

The next patch updates the numa stats counter size and threshold.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1503568801-21305-2-git-send-email-kemi.wang@intel.com


Signed-off-by: Kemi Wang <kemi.wang@intel.com>
Reported-by: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi.kleen@intel.com>
Cc: Ying Huang <ying.huang@intel.com>
Cc: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>