On Sep 28, 2010, at 5:30 PM, Andriy Gapon wrote: << snipped lots of good info here... probably won't have time to look at it in detail until the weekend >>
>> there seems to be a layering violation in that the buffer cache signals >> directly to the upper page daemon layer to trigger page reclamation.) > > Umm, not sure if that is a fact. I was referring to the code in vfs_bio.c that used to twiddle vm_pageout_deficit directly. That seems to have been replaced with a call to vm_page_grab(). >> The old (ancient) patch I tried previously to help reduce the arc working set >> and allow it to shrink is here: >> >> http://www.wanderview.com/svn/public/misc/zfs/zfs_kmem_limit.diff >> >> Unfortunately, there are a couple ideas on fighting fragmentation mixed into >> that patch. See the part about arc_reclaim_pages(). This patch did seem to >> allow my arc to stay under the target maximum even when under load that >> previously caused the system to exceed the maximum. When I update this >> weekend I'll try a stripped down version of the patch to see if it helps or >> not with the latest zfs. >> >> Thanks for your help in understanding this stuff! > > The patch seems good, especially the part about taking into account the kmem > fragmentation. But it also seems to be heavily tuned towards "tiny ARC" > systems > like yours, so I am not sure yet how suitable it is for "mainstream" systems. Thanks. Yea, there is a lot of aggressive tuning there. In particular, the slow growth algorithm is somewhat dubious. What I found, though, was that the fragmentation jumped whenever the arc was reduced in size, so it was an attempt to make the size slowly approach peak load without overshooting. A better long term solution would probably be to enhance UMA to support custom slab sizes on a zone-by-zone basis. That way all zfs/arc allocations can use slabs of 128k (at a memory efficiency penalty of course). I prototyped this with a dumbed down block pool allocator at one point and was able to avoid most, if not all, of the fragmentation. Adding the support to UMA seemed non-trivial, though. Thanks again for the information. I hope to get a chance to look at the code this weekend. - Ben_______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
