On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 6:35 AM Feng Tang [off-list ref] wrote:

When profiling memory cgroup involved benchmarking, status update
sometimes take quite some CPU cycles. Current MEMCG_CHARGE_BATCH
is used for both charging and statistics/events updating, and is
set to 32, which may be good for accuracy of memcg charging, but
too small for stats update which causes concurrent access to global
stats data instead of per-cpu ones.

So handle them differently, by adding a new bigger batch number
for stats updating, while keeping the value for charging (though
comments in memcontrol.h suggests to consider a bigger value too)

The new batch is set to 512, which considers 2MB huge pages (512
pages), as the check logic mostly is:

    if (x > BATCH), then skip updating global data

so it will save 50% global data updating for 2MB pages

Following are some performance data with the patch, against
v5.11-rc1, on several generations of Xeon platforms. Each category
below has several subcases run on different platform, and only the
worst and best scores are listed:

fio:                             +2.0% ~  +6.8%
will-it-scale/malloc:            -0.9% ~  +6.2%
will-it-scale/page_fault1:       no change
will-it-scale/page_fault2:      +13.7% ~ +26.2%

One thought is it could be dynamically calculated according to
memcg limit and number of CPUs, and another is to add a periodic
syncing of the data for accuracy reason similar to vmstat, as
suggested by Ying.

I am going to push back on this change. On a large system where jobs
can run on any available cpu, this will totally mess up the stats
(which is actually what happens on our production servers). These
stats are used for multiple purposes like debugging or understanding
the memory usage of the job or doing data analysis.