Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 5 Dec 2018 17:21:47 -0500 | From | Andrea Arcangeli <> | Subject | Re: [patch 1/2 for-4.20] mm, thp: restore node-local hugepage allocations |
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On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 09:15:28PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote: > If the __GFP_THISNODE should be really used then it should be applied to > all other types of pages. Not only THP. And as such done in a separate > patch. Not a part of the revert. The cleanup was meant to unify THP > allocations and that is why I object to reverting it as a part of this > work.
I also wonder if using __GFP_THISNODE for all pages and not only THP may really help David's workload performance further if it's so NUMA sensitive and short lived too (plus we know it most of the time fits in a single node). It'll get rid of the cache in the local node before allocating remote memory. Of course than the swap storms and pathological performance for processes that don't fit in a node, will also materialize without THP enabled. If this is true, that'd point further to the need of a MPOL that can set __GFP_THISNODE not just for THP but for all allocations, with the only difference that if it's the regular page size failing, instead of hitting OOM it should do one last fallback to a regular page size allocation without __GFP_THISNODE set.
Regardless of the above I think it's still interesting to look into adding more NUMA affinity to THP somehow, but I doubt we want to do that at the price of crippling compaction in a way it can't generate THP anymore once a node is full of cache, and certainly we don't want to cripple compaction in non-NUMA hosts too like it'd be happening with the current proposed patch. Furthermore whatever we do should work for order 8 7 6 etc.. too. If we did a order 9 specialized trick that cripples compaction effectiveness, it'd be a short term approach and it'd be tailored to David's use case that seems to be sensitive to allocation latency. Being sensitive to allocation latency doesn't make that process a good fit for MADV_HUGEPAGE to begin with.
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