mm/page_alloc: delete vm.percpu_pagelist_fraction

Patch series "Calculate pcp->high based on zone sizes and active CPUs", v2. The per-cpu page allocator (PCP) is meant to reduce contention on the zone lock but the sizing of batch and high is archaic and neither takes the zone size into account or the number of CPUs local to a zone. With larger zones and more CPUs per node, the contention is getting worse. Furthermore, the fact that vm.percpu_pagelist_fraction adjusts both batch and high values means that the sysctl can reduce zone lock contention but also increase allocation latencies. This series disassociates pcp->high from pcp->batch and then scales pcp->high based on the size of the local zone with limited impact to reclaim and accounting for active CPUs but leaves pcp->batch static. It also adapts the number of pages that can be on the pcp list based on recent freeing patterns. The motivation is partially to adjust to larger memory sizes but is also driven by the fact that large batches of page freeing via release_pages() often shows zone contention as a major part of the problem. Another is a bug report based on an older kernel where a multi-terabyte process can takes several minutes to exit. A workaround was to use vm.percpu_pagelist_fraction to increase the pcp->high value but testing indicated that a production workload could not use the same values because of an increase in allocation latencies. Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce this test case myself as the multi-terabyte machines are in active use but it should alleviate the problem. The series aims to address both and partially acts as a pre-requisite. pcp only works with order-0 which is useless for SLUB (when using high orders) and THP (unconditionally). To store high-order pages on PCP, the pcp->high values need to be increased first. This patch (of 6): The vm.percpu_pagelist_fraction is used to increase the batch and high limits for the per-cpu page allocator (PCP). The intent behind the sysctl is to reduce zone lock acquisition when allocating/freeing pages but it has a problem. While it can decrease contention, it can also increase latency on the allocation side due to unreasonably large batch sizes. This leads to games where an administrator adjusts percpu_pagelist_fraction on the fly to work around contention and allocation latency problems. This series aims to alleviate the problems with zone lock contention while avoiding the allocation-side latency problems. For the purposes of review, it's easier to remove this sysctl now and reintroduce a similar sysctl later in the series that deals only with pcp->high.

MGMel Gorman committed 5 years ago