Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 16 Oct 2013 18:11:56 -0700 (PDT) | From | David Rientjes <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] mm: Do not walk all of system memory during show_mem |
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On Wed, 16 Oct 2013, Mel Gorman wrote:
> It has been reported on very large machines that show_mem is taking almost > 5 minutes to display information. This is a serious problem if there is > an OOM storm. The bulk of the cost is in show_mem doing a very expensive > PFN walk to give us the following information > > Total RAM: Also available as totalram_pages > Highmem pages: Also available as totalhigh_pages > Reserved pages: Can be inferred from the zone structure > Shared pages: PFN walk required > Unshared pages: PFN walk required > Quick pages: Per-cpu walk required > > Only the shared/unshared pages requires a full PFN walk but that information > is useless. It is also inaccurate as page pins of unshared pages would > be accounted for as shared. Even if the information was accurate, I'm > struggling to think how the shared/unshared information could be useful > for debugging OOM conditions. Maybe it was useful before rmap existed when > reclaiming shared pages was costly but it is less relevant today. > > The PFN walk could be optimised a bit but why bother as the information is > useless. This patch deletes the PFN walker and infers the total RAM, highmem > and reserved pages count from struct zone. It omits the shared/unshared page > usage on the grounds that it is useless. It also corrects the reporting > of HighMem as HighMem/MovableOnly as ZONE_MOVABLE has similar problems to > HighMem with respect to lowmem/highmem exhaustion. >
We haven't been hit by this for the oom killer, but we did get hit with this for page allocation failure warnings as a result of having irqs disabled and passing GFP_ATOMIC to the page allocator without GFP_NOWARN. That was the intention of passing SHOW_MEM_FILTER_PAGE_COUNT into show_mem() in 4b59e6c47309 ("mm, show_mem: suppress page counts in non-blockable contexts").
With this, I assume we can just remove SHOW_MEM_FILTER_PAGE_COUNT entirely?
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