sched/numa: Skip some page migrations after a shared fault

Shared faults can lead to lots of unnecessary page migrations,
slowing down the system, and causing private faults to hit the
per-pgdat migration ratelimit.

This patch adds sysctl numa_balancing_migrate_deferred, which specifies
how many shared page migrations to skip unconditionally, after each page
migration that is skipped because it is a shared fault.

This reduces the number of page migrations back and forth in
shared fault situations. It also gives a strong preference to
the tasks that are already running where most of the memory is,
and to moving the other tasks to near the memory.

Testing this with a much higher scan rate than the default
still seems to result in fewer page migrations than before.

Memory seems to be somewhat better consolidated than previously,
with multi-instance specjbb runs on a 4 node system.

Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1381141781-10992-62-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c
index 8454c38b1b12..e7884dc3416d 100644
--- a/kernel/sched/fair.c
+++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c
@@ -833,6 +833,14 @@ unsigned int sysctl_numa_balancing_scan_size = 256;
 /* Scan @scan_size MB every @scan_period after an initial @scan_delay in ms */
 unsigned int sysctl_numa_balancing_scan_delay = 1000;
 
+/*
+ * After skipping a page migration on a shared page, skip N more numa page
+ * migrations unconditionally. This reduces the number of NUMA migrations
+ * in shared memory workloads, and has the effect of pulling tasks towards
+ * where their memory lives, over pulling the memory towards the task.
+ */
+unsigned int sysctl_numa_balancing_migrate_deferred = 16;
+
 static unsigned int task_nr_scan_windows(struct task_struct *p)
 {
 	unsigned long rss = 0;