swap: add a simple detector for inappropriate swapin readahead

This is a patch to improve swap readahead algorithm. It's from Hugh and I
slightly changed it.

Hugh's original changelog:

swapin readahead does a blind readahead, whether or not the swapin
is sequential.  This may be ok on harddisk, because large reads have
relatively small costs, and if the readahead pages are unneeded they
can be reclaimed easily - though, what if their allocation forced
reclaim of useful pages?  But on SSD devices large reads are more
expensive than small ones: if the readahead pages are unneeded,
reading them in caused significant overhead.

This patch adds very simplistic random read detection.  Stealing
the PageReadahead technique from Konstantin Khlebnikov's patch,
avoiding the vma/anon_vma sophistications of Shaohua Li's patch,
swapin_nr_pages() simply looks at readahead's current success
rate, and narrows or widens its readahead window accordingly.
There is little science to its heuristic: it's about as stupid
as can be whilst remaining effective.

The table below shows elapsed times (in centiseconds) when running
a single repetitive swapping load across a 1000MB mapping in 900MB
ram with 1GB swap (the harddisk tests had taken painfully too long
when I used mem=500M, but SSD shows similar results for that).

Vanilla is the 3.6-rc7 kernel on which I started; Shaohua denotes
his Sep 3 patch in mmotm and linux-next; HughOld denotes my Oct 1
patch which Shaohua showed to be defective; HughNew this Nov 14
patch, with page_cluster as usual at default of 3 (8-page reads);
HughPC4 this same patch with page_cluster 4 (16-page reads);
HughPC0 with page_cluster 0 (1-page reads: no readahead).

HDD for swapping to harddisk, SSD for swapping to VertexII SSD.
Seq for sequential access to the mapping, cycling five times around;
Rand for the same number of random touches.  Anon for a MAP_PRIVATE
anon mapping; Shmem for a MAP_SHARED anon mapping, equivalent to tmpfs.

One weakness of Shaohua's vma/anon_vma approach was that it did
not optimize Shmem: seen below.  Konstantin's approach was perhaps
mistuned, 50% slower on Seq: did not compete and is not shown below.

HDD        Vanilla Shaohua HughOld HughNew HughPC4 HughPC0
Seq Anon     73921   76210   75611   76904   78191  121542
Seq Shmem    73601   73176   73855   72947   74543  118322
Rand Anon   895392  831243  871569  845197  846496  841680
Rand Shmem 1058375 1053486  827935  764955  764376  756489

SSD        Vanilla Shaohua HughOld HughNew HughPC4 HughPC0
Seq Anon     24634   24198   24673   25107   21614   70018
Seq Shmem    24959   24932   25052   25703   22030   69678
Rand Anon    43014   26146   28075   25989   26935   25901
Rand Shmem   45349   45215   28249   24268   24138   24332

These tests are, of course, two extremes of a very simple case:
under heavier mixed loads I've not yet observed any consistent
improvement or degradation, and wider testing would be welcome.

Shaohua Li:

Test shows Vanilla is slightly better in sequential workload than Hugh's patch.
I observed with Hugh's patch sometimes the readahead size is shrinked too fast
(from 8 to 1 immediately) in sequential workload if there is no hit. And in
such case, continuing doing readahead is good actually.

I don't prepare a sophisticated algorithm for the sequential workload because
so far we can't guarantee sequential accessed pages are swap out sequentially.
So I slightly change Hugh's heuristic - don't shrink readahead size too fast.

Here is my test result (unit second, 3 runs average):
	Vanilla		Hugh		New
Seq	356		370		360
Random	4525		2447		2444

Attached graph is the swapin/swapout throughput I collected with 'vmstat 2'.
The first part is running a random workload (till around 1200 of the x-axis)
and the second part is running a sequential workload. swapin and swapout
throughput are almost identical in steady state in both workloads. These are
expected behavior. while in Vanilla, swapin is much bigger than swapout
especially in random workload (because wrong readahead).

Original patches by: Shaohua Li and Konstantin Khlebnikov.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@openvz.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/page-flags.h b/include/linux/page-flags.h
index e464b4e987e8..d1fe1a761047 100644
--- a/include/linux/page-flags.h
+++ b/include/linux/page-flags.h
@@ -228,9 +228,9 @@ PAGEFLAG(OwnerPriv1, owner_priv_1) TESTCLEARFLAG(OwnerPriv1, owner_priv_1)
 TESTPAGEFLAG(Writeback, writeback) TESTSCFLAG(Writeback, writeback)
 PAGEFLAG(MappedToDisk, mappedtodisk)
 
-/* PG_readahead is only used for file reads; PG_reclaim is only for writes */
+/* PG_readahead is only used for reads; PG_reclaim is only for writes */
 PAGEFLAG(Reclaim, reclaim) TESTCLEARFLAG(Reclaim, reclaim)
-PAGEFLAG(Readahead, reclaim)		/* Reminder to do async read-ahead */
+PAGEFLAG(Readahead, reclaim) TESTCLEARFLAG(Readahead, reclaim)
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_HIGHMEM
 /*