Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 Dec 2016 10:20:45 +0000 | From | Mel Gorman <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 0/7] vm, vmscan: enahance vmscan tracepoints |
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On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 10:36:55AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: > On Fri 30-12-16 09:11:17, Mel Gorman wrote: > > On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 04:30:25PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: > > > Hi, > > > while debugging [1] I've realized that there is some room for > > > improvements in the tracepoints set we offer currently. I had hard times > > > to make any conclusion from the existing ones. The resulting problem > > > turned out to be active list aging [2] and we are missing at least two > > > tracepoints to debug such a problem. > > > > > > Some existing tracepoints could export more information to see _why_ the > > > reclaim progress cannot be made not only _how much_ we could reclaim. > > > The later could be seen quite reasonably from the vmstat counters > > > already. It can be argued that we are showing too many implementation > > > details in those tracepoints but I consider them way too lowlevel > > > already to be usable by any kernel independent userspace. I would be > > > _really_ surprised if anything but debugging tools have used them. > > > > > > Any feedback is highly appreciated. > > > > > > > There is some minor overhead introduced in some paths regardless of > > whether the tracepoints are active or not but I suspect it's negligible > > in the context of the overhead of reclaim in general so; > > I will work on improving some of them. E.g. I've dropped the change to > free_hot_cold_page_list because that is indeed a hot path but other than > that there shouldn't be any even medium hot path which should see any > overhead I can see. If you are aware of any, please let me know and I > will think about how to improve it. >
I didn't spot one. The path where I saw the most overhead is already quite heavy.
-- Mel Gorman SUSE Labs
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