Re: [PATCH 4/8] mm: free swp_entry in madvise_free

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 01:28:14PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:

On Fri 30-10-15 16:01:40, Minchan Kim wrote:

quoted

When I test below piece of code with 12 processes(ie, 512M * 12 = 6G
consume) on my (3G ram + 12 cpu + 8G swap, the madvise_free is siginficat
slower (ie, 2x times) than madvise_dontneed.

loop = 5;
mmap(512M);
while (loop--) {
        memset(512M);
        madvise(MADV_FREE or MADV_DONTNEED);
}

The reason is lots of swapin.

1) dontneed: 1,612 swapin
2) madvfree: 879,585 swapin

If we find hinted pages were already swapped out when syscall is called,
it's pointless to keep the swapped-out pages in pte.
Instead, let's free the cold page because swapin is more expensive
than (alloc page + zeroing).

With this patch, it reduced swapin from 879,585 to 1,878 so elapsed time

1) dontneed: 6.10user 233.50system 0:50.44elapsed
2) madvfree: 6.03user 401.17system 1:30.67elapsed
2) madvfree + below patch: 6.70user 339.14system 1:04.45elapsed

Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <redacted>

Yes this makes a lot of sense.

Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko-IBi9RG/b67k@public.gmane.org>

Thanks!

One nit below.

quoted

---
 mm/madvise.c | 26 +++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 25 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/madvise.c b/mm/madvise.c
index 640311704e31..663bd9fa0ae0 100644
--- a/mm/madvise.c
+++ b/mm/madvise.c

@@ -270,6 +270,8 @@ static int madvise_free_pte_range(pmd_t *pmd, unsigned long addr,
 	spinlock_t *ptl;
 	pte_t *pte, ptent;
 	struct page *page;
+	swp_entry_t entry;

This could go into !pte_present if block

Sure, I fixed.