Re: [PATCH RFC 2/2] memcg: add threshold for anon rss
From: Kamezawa Hiroyuki <hidden>
Date: 2014-09-12 01:23:50
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linux-mm, lkml
(2014/09/12 0:41), Vladimir Davydov wrote:
Though hard memory limits suit perfectly for sand-boxing, they are not that efficient when it comes to partitioning a server's resources among multiple containers. The point is a container consuming a particular amount of memory most of time may have infrequent spikes in the load. Setting the hard limit to the maximal possible usage (spike) will lower server utilization while setting it to the "normal" usage will result in heavy lags during the spikes. To handle such scenarios soft limits were introduced. The idea is to allow a container to breach the limit freely when there's enough free memory, but shrink it back to the limit aggressively on global memory pressure. However, the concept of soft limits is intrinsically unsafe by itself: if a container eats too much anonymous memory, it will be very slow or even impossible (if there's no swap) to reclaim its resources back to the limit. As a result the whole system will be feeling bad until it finally realizes the culprit must die. Currently we have no way to react to anonymous memory + swap usage growth inside a container: the memsw counter accounts both anonymous memory and file caches and swap, so we have neither a limit for anon+swap nor a threshold notification. Actually, memsw is totally useless if one wants to make full use of soft limits: it should be set to a very large value or infinity then, otherwise it just makes no sense. That's one of the reasons why I think we should replace memsw with a kind of anonsw so that it'd account only anon+swap. This way we'd still be able to sand-box apps, but it'd also allow us to avoid nasty surprises like the one I described above. For more arguments for and against this idea, please see the following thread: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg78180.html There's an alternative to this approach backed by Kamezawa. He thinks that OOM on anon+swap limit hit is a no-go and proposes to use memory thresholds for it. I still strongly disagree with the proposal, because it's unsafe (what if the userspace handler won't react in time?). Nevertheless, I implement his idea in this RFC. I hope this will fuel the debate, because sadly enough nobody seems to care about this problem. So this patch adds the "memory.rss" file that shows the amount of anonymous memory consumed by a cgroup and the event to handle threshold notifications coming from it. The notification works exactly in the same fashion as the existing memory/memsw usage notifications.
So, now, you know you can handle "threshould". If you want to implement "automatic-oom-killall-in-a-contanier-threshold-in-kernel", I don't have any objections. What you want is not limit, you want a trigger for killing process. Threshold + Kill is enough, using res_counter for that is overspec. You don't need res_counter and don't need to break other guy's use case. Thanks, -Kame -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@kvack.org"> email@kvack.org </a>