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, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c
index e509b90..a159e1f 100644
--- a/kernel/sysctl.c
+++ b/kernel/sysctl.c
@@ -391,6 +391,13 @@ static struct ctl_table kern_table[] = {
 		.mode           = 0644,
 		.proc_handler   = proc_dointvec,
 	},
+	{
+		.procname       = "numa_balancing_migrate_deferred",
+		.data           = &sysctl_numa_balancing_migrate_deferred,
+		.maxlen         = sizeof(unsigned int),
+		.mode           = 0644,
+		.proc_handler   = proc_dointvec,
+	},
 #endif /* CONFIG_NUMA_BALANCING */
 #endif /* CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG */
 	{