Subject: Re: Kernel 4.19 network performance - forwarding/routing normal users traffic

From: Aaron Lu <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2018 13:23:56 +0800

On Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 08:23:19PM +0000, Saeed Mahameed wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-11-01 at 23:27 +0800, Aaron Lu wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 10:22:13AM +0100, Jesper Dangaard Brouer
> > wrote:
> > ... ...
> > > Section copied out:
> > > 
> > >   mlx5e_poll_tx_cq
> > >   |          
> > >    --16.34%--napi_consume_skb
> > >              |          
> > >              |--12.65%--__free_pages_ok
> > >              |          |          
> > >              |           --11.86%--free_one_page
> > >              |                     |          
> > >              |                     |--10.10%
> > > --queued_spin_lock_slowpath
> > >              |                     |          
> > >              |                      --0.65%--_raw_spin_lock
> > 
> > This callchain looks like it is freeing higher order pages than order
> > 0:
> > __free_pages_ok is only called for pages whose order are bigger than
> > 0.
> 
> mlx5 rx uses only order 0 pages, so i don't know where these high order
> tx SKBs are coming from.. 

Perhaps here:
__netdev_alloc_skb(), __napi_alloc_skb(), __netdev_alloc_frag() and
__napi_alloc_frag() will all call page_frag_alloc(), which will use
__page_frag_cache_refill() to get an order 3 page if possible, or fall
back to an order 0 page if order 3 page is not available.

I'm not sure if your workload will use the above code path though.