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authorShaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>2013-09-11 14:20:32 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2013-09-11 15:57:17 -0700
commitebc2a1a69111eadfeda8487e577f1a5d42ef0dae (patch)
tree8a1d08bc6c0a1eb7e1bcd93056141614c22a7d40 /arch
parentedfe23dac3e2981277087b05bec7fec7790d1835 (diff)
swap: make cluster allocation per-cpu
swap cluster allocation is to get better request merge to improve performance. But the cluster is shared globally, if multiple tasks are doing swap, this will cause interleave disk access. While multiple tasks swap is quite common, for example, each numa node has a kswapd thread doing swap and multiple threads/processes doing direct page reclaim. ioscheduler can't help too much here, because tasks don't send swapout IO down to block layer in the meantime. Block layer does merge some IOs, but a lot not, depending on how many tasks are doing swapout concurrently. In practice, I've seen a lot of small size IO in swapout workloads. We makes the cluster allocation per-cpu here. The interleave disk access issue goes away. All tasks swapout to their own cluster, so swapout will become sequential, which can be easily merged to big size IO. If one CPU can't get its per-cpu cluster (for example, there is no free cluster anymore in the swap), it will fallback to scan swap_map. The CPU can still continue swap. We don't need recycle free swap entries of other CPUs. In my test (swap to a 2-disk raid0 partition), this improves around 10% swapout throughput, and request size is increased significantly. How does this impact swap readahead is uncertain though. On one side, page reclaim always isolates and swaps several adjancent pages, this will make page reclaim write the pages sequentially and benefit readahead. On the other side, several CPU write pages interleave means the pages don't live _sequentially_ but relatively _near_. In the per-cpu allocation case, if adjancent pages are written by different cpus, they will live relatively _far_. So how this impacts swap readahead depends on how many pages page reclaim isolates and swaps one time. If the number is big, this patch will benefit swap readahead. Of course, this is about sequential access pattern. The patch has no impact for random access pattern, because the new cluster allocation algorithm is just for SSD. Alternative solution is organizing swap layout to be per-mm instead of this per-cpu approach. In the per-mm layout, we allocate a disk range for each mm, so pages of one mm live in swap disk adjacently. per-mm layout has potential issues of lock contention if multiple reclaimers are swap pages from one mm. For a sequential workload, per-mm layout is better to implement swap readahead, because pages from the mm are adjacent in disk. But per-cpu layout isn't very bad in this workload, as page reclaim always isolates and swaps several pages one time, such pages will still live in disk sequentially and readahead can utilize this. For a random workload, per-mm layout isn't beneficial of request merge, because it's quite possible pages from different mm are swapout in the meantime and IO can't be merged in per-mm layout. while with per-cpu layout we can merge requests from any mm. Considering random workload is more popular in workloads with swap (and per-cpu approach isn't too bad for sequential workload too), I'm choosing per-cpu layout. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Cc: Kyungmin Park <kmpark@infradead.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'arch')
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