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    SubjectRe: VM balancing issues on 2.6.13: dentry cache not getting shrunk enough
    On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 11:48:52AM -0400, Sonny Rao wrote:
    > On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 07:59:32AM +1000, David Chinner wrote:
    > > On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 02:17:52PM +0530, Bharata B Rao wrote:
    > > >
    > > > Second is Sonny Rao's rbtree dentry reclaim patch which is an attempt
    > > > to improve this dcache fragmentation problem.
    > >
    > > FYI, in the past I've tried this patch to reduce dcache fragmentation on
    > > an Altix (16k pages, 62 dentries to a slab page) under heavy
    > > fileserver workloads and it had no measurable effect. It appeared
    > > that there was almost always at least one active dentry on each page
    > > in the slab. The story may very well be different on 4k page
    > > machines, however.

    ....

    > I'm not surprised... With 62 dentrys per page, the likelyhood of
    > success is very small, and in fact performance could degrade since we
    > are holding the dcache lock more often and doing less useful work.
    >
    > It has been over a year and my memory is hazy, but I think I did see
    > about a 10% improvement on my workload (some sort of SFS simulation
    > with millions of files being randomly accessed) on an x86 machine but CPU
    > utilization also went way up which I think was the dcache lock.

    Hmmm - can't say that I've had the same experience. I did not notice
    any decrease in fragmentation or increase in CPU usage...

    FWIW, SFS is just one workload that produces fragmentation. Any
    load that mixes or switches repeatedly between filesystem traversals
    to producing memory pressure via the page cache tends to result in
    fragmentation of the inode and dentry slabs...

    > Whatever happened to the vfs_cache_pressue band-aid/sledgehammer ?
    > Is it not considered an option ?

    All that did was increase the fragmentation levels. Instead of
    seeing a 4-5:1 free/used ratio in the dcache, it would push out to
    10-15:1 if vfs_cache_pressue was used to prefer reclaiming dentries
    over page cache pages. Going the other way and prefering reclaim of
    page cache pages did nothing to change the level of fragmentation.
    Reclaim still freed most of the dentries in the working set but it
    took a little longer to do it.

    Right now our only solution to prevent fragmentation on reclaim is
    to throw more memory at the machine to prevent reclaim from
    happening as the workload changes.

    Cheers,

    Dave.
    --
    Dave Chinner
    R&D Software Enginner
    SGI Australian Software Group
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