[PATCH] slab: Node rotor for freeing alien caches and remote per cpu pages.

The cache reaper currently tries to free all alien caches and all remote
per cpu pages in each pass of cache_reap.  For a machines with large number
of nodes (such as Altix) this may lead to sporadic delays of around ~10ms.
Interrupts are disabled while reclaiming creating unacceptable delays.

This patch changes that behavior by adding a per cpu reap_node variable.
Instead of attempting to free all caches, we free only one alien cache and
the per cpu pages from one remote node.  That reduces the time spend in
cache_reap.  However, doing so will lengthen the time it takes to
completely drain all remote per cpu pagesets and all alien caches.  The
time needed will grow with the number of nodes in the system.  All caches
are drained when they overflow their respective capacity.  So the drawback
here is only that a bit of memory may be wasted for awhile longer.

Details:

1. Rename drain_remote_pages to drain_node_pages to allow the specification
   of the node to drain of pcp pages.

2. Add additional functions init_reap_node, next_reap_node for NUMA
   that manage a per cpu reap_node counter.

3. Add a reap_alien function that reaps only from the current reap_node.

For us this seems to be a critical issue.  Holdoffs of an average of ~7ms
cause some HPC benchmarks to slow down significantly.  F.e.  NAS parallel
slows down dramatically.  NAS parallel has a 12-16 seconds runtime w/o rotor
compared to 5.8 secs with the rotor patches.  It gets down to 5.05 secs with
the additional interrupt holdoff reductions.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/gfp.h b/include/linux/gfp.h
index 20f9148e38d..7851e6b520c 100644
--- a/include/linux/gfp.h
+++ b/include/linux/gfp.h
@@ -157,9 +157,9 @@ extern void FASTCALL(free_cold_page(struct page *page));
 
 void page_alloc_init(void);
 #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA
-void drain_remote_pages(void);
+void drain_node_pages(int node);
 #else
-static inline void drain_remote_pages(void) { };
+static inline void drain_node_pages(int node) { };
 #endif
 
 #endif /* __LINUX_GFP_H */