mm: vmscan: kswapd should not free an excessive number of pages when balancing small...

mm: vmscan: kswapd should not free an excessive number of pages when balancing small zones

BugLink: http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/808509

When reclaiming for order-0 pages, kswapd requires that all zones be
balanced.  Each cycle through balance_pgdat() does background ageing on
all zones if necessary and applies equal pressure on the inactive zone
unless a lot of pages are free already.

A "lot of free pages" is defined as a "balance gap" above the high
watermark which is currently 7*high_watermark.  Historically this was
reasonable as min_free_kbytes was small.  However, on systems using huge
pages, it is recommended that min_free_kbytes is higher and it is tuned
with hugeadm --set-recommended-min_free_kbytes.  With the introduction of
transparent huge page support, this recommended value is also applied.  On
X86-64 with 4G of memory, min_free_kbytes becomes 67584 so one would
expect around 68M of memory to be free.  The Normal zone is approximately
35000 pages so under even normal memory pressure such as copying a large
file, it gets exhausted quickly.  As it is getting exhausted, kswapd
applies pressure equally to all zones, including the DMA32 zone.  DMA32 is
approximately 700,000 pages with a high watermark of around 23,000 pages.
In this situation, kswapd will reclaim around (23000*8 where 8 is the high
watermark + balance gap of 7 * high watermark) pages or 718M of pages
before the zone is ignored.  What the user sees is that free memory far
higher than it should be.

To avoid an excessive number of pages being reclaimed from the larger
zones, explicitely defines the "balance gap" to be either 1% of the zone
or the low watermark for the zone, whichever is smaller.  While kswapd
will check all zones to apply pressure, it'll ignore zones that meets the
(high_wmark + balance_gap) watermark.

To test this, 80G were copied from a partition and the amount of memory
being used was recorded.  A comparison of a patch and unpatched kernel can
be seen at
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~mel/postings/minfree-20110222/memory-usage-hydra.ps
and shows that kswapd is not reclaiming as much memory with the patch
applied.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: "Chen, Tim C" <tim.c.chen@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

(cherry picked from commit 8afdcece4911e51cfff2b50a269418914cab8a3f)
Acked-by: Stefan Bader <stefan.bader@canonical.com>
Acked-by: Leann Ogasawara <leann.ogasawara@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Tim Gardner <tim.gardner@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@canonical.com>