Subject: Re: [PATCH 13/14] mm: memcontrol: account socket memory in unified hierarchy memory controller

From: Johannes Weiner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 14:31:23 -0500

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 01:00:59PM +0300, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> I've another question regarding this socket_work: its reclaim target
> always equals CHARGE_BATCH. Can't it result in a workload exceeding
> memory.high in case there are a lot of allocations coming from different
> cpus? In this case the work might not manage to complete before another
> allocation happens. May be, we should accumulate the number of pages to
> be reclaimed by the work, as we do in try_charge?

Actually, try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages() rounds it up to 2MB anyway. I
would hate to add locking or more atomics to accumulate a reclaim goal
for the worker on spec, so let's wait to see if this is a real issue.

> > > BTW why do we need this work at all? Why is reclaim_high called from
> > > task_work not enough?
> > 
> > The problem lies in the memcg association: the random task that gets
> > interrupted by an arriving packet might not be in the same memcg as
> > the one owning receiving socket. And multiple interrupts could happen
> > while we're in the kernel already charging pages. We'd basically have
> > to maintain a list of memcgs that need to run reclaim_high associated
> > with current.
> > 
> 
> Right, I think this is worth placing in a comment to memcg->socket_work.

Okay, will do.

> I wonder if we could use it *instead* of task_work for handling every
> allocation, not only socket-related. Would it make any sense? May be, it
> could reduce the latency experienced by tasks in memory cgroups.

No, we *want* charging tasks to do reclaim work once memory.high is
breached, in order to match their speed to memory availability. That
needs to remain synchroneous.

What we could try is make memcg->socket_work purely about the receive
side when we're inside the softirq, and arm the per-task work when in
process context on the sending side. I'll look into that.

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