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SubjectRe: [PATCH mmotm] mm: alloc_large_system_hash check order
On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 03:00:15PM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > <SNIP>
> >
> > Andrew noticed another oddity: that if it goes the hashdist __vmalloc()
> > way, it won't be limited by MAX_ORDER. Makes one wonder whether it
> > ought to fall back to __vmalloc() if the alloc_pages_exact() fails.
>
> I don't believe so. __vmalloc() is only used when hashdist= is used or on IA-64
> (according to the documentation).

I was foolish to believe the documentation. vmalloc() will be used by
default on 64-bit NUMA, not just IA-64.

> It is used in the case that the caller is
> willing to deal with the vmalloc() overhead (e.g. using base page PTEs) in
> exchange for the pages being interleaved on different nodes so that access
> to the hash table has average performance[*]
>
> If we automatically fell back to vmalloc(), I bet 2c we'd eventually get
> a mysterious performance regression report for a workload that depended on
> the hash tables performance but that there was enough memory for the hash
> table to be allocated with vmalloc() instead of alloc_pages_exact().
>

I think this point still holds. On non-NUMA machine, we don't want to fall
back to using vmalloc() just because the machine happened to have enough
memory. It's really tricky to know for sure though - will there be enough
performance benefits from having a bigger hash table to offset using base
pages to back it? It's probably unknowable because it depends on the exact
hardware and how the hash table is being used.

> [*] I speculate that on non-IA64 NUMA machines that we see different
> performance for large filesystem benchmarks depending on whether we are
> running on the boot-CPU node or not depending on whether hashdist=
> is used or not.

This speculation is junk because using vmalloc() for hash tables is not
specific to IA-64.

> <SNIP>

--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab


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