On Mon 25-07-16 13:47:32, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 10:39:25 -0400 Kyle Walker <kwal...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > Java workloads using the MappedByteBuffer library result in the fadvise()
> > and madvise() syscalls being used extensively. Following recent readahead
> > limiting alterations, such as 600e19af ("mm: use only per-device readahead
> > limit") and 6d2be915 ("mm/readahead.c: fix readahead failure for
> > memoryless NUMA nodes and limit readahead pages"), application performance
> > suffers in instances where small readahead is configured.
>
> Can this suffering be quantified please?
>
> > By moving this limit outside of the syscall codepaths, the syscalls are
> > able to advise an inordinately large amount of readahead when desired.
> > With a cap being imposed based on the half of NR_INACTIVE_FILE and
> > NR_FREE_PAGES. In essence, allowing performance tuning efforts to define a
> > small readahead limit, but then benefiting from large sequential readahead
> > values selectively.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > --- a/mm/readahead.c
> > +++ b/mm/readahead.c
> > @@ -211,7 +211,9 @@ int force_page_cache_readahead(struct address_space
> > *mapping, struct file *filp,
> > if (unlikely(!mapping->a_ops->readpage && !mapping->a_ops->readpages))
> > return -EINVAL;
> >
> > - nr_to_read = min(nr_to_read, inode_to_bdi(mapping->host)->ra_pages);
> > + nr_to_read = min(nr_to_read, (global_page_state(NR_INACTIVE_FILE) +
> > + (global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES)) / 2));
> > +
> > while (nr_to_read) {
> > int err;
> >
> > @@ -484,6 +486,7 @@ void page_cache_sync_readahead(struct address_space
> > *mapping,
> >
> > /* be dumb */
> > if (filp && (filp->f_mode & FMODE_RANDOM)) {
> > + req_size = min(req_size, inode_to_bdi(mapping->host)->ra_pages);
> > force_page_cache_readahead(mapping, filp, offset, req_size);
> > return;
> > }
>
> Linus probably has opinions ;)
Just for the reference a similar patch has been discussed already [1] or
from a different angle [2]
[1]
http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1440087598-27185-1-git-send-email-kl...@yandex-team.ru
[2]
http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1456277927-12044-1-git-send-email-han...@cmpxchg.org
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
