Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/8] mm: memcontrol: account socket memory in unified hierarchy

From: Johannes Weiner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2015 11:58:10 -0700

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 11:20:03AM +0300, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> Then you'd better not touch existing tcp limits at all, because they
> just work, and the logic behind them is very close to that of global tcp
> limits. I don't think one can simplify it somehow.

Uhm, no, there is a crapload of boilerplate code and complication that
seems entirely unnecessary. The only thing missing from my patch seems
to be the part where it enters memory pressure state when the limit is
hit. I'm adding this for completeness, but I doubt it even matters.

> Moreover, frankly I still have my reservations about this vmpressure
> propagation to skb you're proposing. It might work, but I doubt it
> will allow us to throw away explicit tcp limit, as I explained
> previously. So, even with your approach I think we can still need
> per memcg tcp limit *unless* you get rid of global tcp limit
> somehow.

Having the hard limit as a failsafe (or a minimum for other consumers)
is one thing, and certainly something I'm open to for cgroupv2, should
we have problems with load startup up after a socket memory landgrab.

That being said, if the VM is struggling to reclaim pages, or is even
swapping, it makes perfect sense to let the socket memory scheduler
know it shouldn't continue to increase its footprint until the VM
recovers. Regardless of any hard limitations/minimum guarantees.

This is what my patch does and it seems pretty straight-forward to
me. I don't really understand why this is so controversial.

The *next* step would be to figure out whether we can actually
*reclaim* memory in the network subsystem--shrink windows and steal
buffers back--and that might even be an avenue to replace tcp window
limits. But it's not necessary for *this* patch series to be useful.

> > So this seemed like a good way to prove a new mechanism before rolling
> > it out to every single Linux setup, rather than switch everybody over
> > after the limited scope testing I can do as a developer on my own.
> > 
> > Keep in mind that my patches are not committing anything in terms of
> > interface, so we retain all the freedom to fix and tune the way this
> > is implemented, including the freedom to re-add tcp window limits in
> > case the pressure balancing is not a comprehensive solution.
> 
> I really dislike this kind of proof. It looks like you're trying to
> push something you think is right covertly, w/o having a proper
> discussion with networking people and then say that it just works
> and hence should be done globally, but what if it won't? Revert it?
> We already have a lot of dubious stuff in memcg that should be
> reverted, so let's please try to avoid this kind of mistakes in
> future. Note, I say "w/o having a proper discussion with networking
> people", because I don't think they will really care *unless* you
> change the global logic, simply because most of them aren't very
> interested in memcg AFAICS.

Come on, Dave is the first To and netdev is CC'd. They might not care
about memcg, but "pushing things covertly" is a bit of a stretch.

> That effectively means you loose a chance to listen to networking
> experts, who could point you at design flaws and propose an improvement
> right away. Let's please not miss such an opportunity. You said that
> you'd seen this problem happen w/o cgroups, so you have a use case that
> might need fixing at the global level. IMO it shouldn't be difficult to
> prepare an RFC patch for the global case first and see what people think
> about it.

No, the problem we are running into is when network memory is not
tracked per cgroup. The lack of containment means that the socket
memory consumption of individual cgroups can trigger system OOM.

We tried using the per-memcg tcp limits, and that prevents the OOMs
for sure, but it's horrendous for network performance. There is no
"stop growing" phase, it just keeps going full throttle until it hits
the wall hard.

Now, we could probably try to replicate the global knobs and add a
per-memcg soft limit. But you know better than anyone else how hard it
is to estimate the overall workingset size of a workload, and the
margins on containerized loads are razor-thin. Performance is much
more sensitive to input errors, and often times parameters must be
adjusted continuously during the runtime of a workload. It'd be
disasterous to rely on yet more static, error-prone user input here.

What all this means to me is that fixing it on the cgroup level has
higher priority. But it also means that once we figured it out under
such a high-pressure environment, it's much easier to apply to the
global case and potentially replace the soft limit there.

This seems like a better approach to me than starting globally, only
to realize that the solution is not workable for cgroups and we need
yet something else.

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