Re: [PATCH v6 4/6] zsmalloc: Add a LRU to zs_pool to keep track of zspages in LRU order

[Johannes Weiner]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 12:11:24AM -0800, Yosry Ahmed wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 12:02 AM Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 7:50 PM Sergey Senozhatsky
> > > There are no accesses to swapped out pages yes, but zspage holds multiple
> > > objects, which are compressed swapped out pages in this particular case.
> > > For example, zspage in class size 176 (bytes) can hold 93 objects per-zspage,
> > > that is 93 compressed swapped out pages. Consider ZS_FULL zspages which
> > > is at the tail of the LRU list. Suppose that we page-faulted 20 times and
> > > read 20 objects from that zspage, IOW zspage has been in use 20 times very
> > > recently, while writeback still considers it to be "not-used" and will
> > > evict it.
> > >
> > > So if this works for you then I'm fine. But we probably, like you suggested,
> > > can document a couple of things here - namely why WRITE access to zspage
> > > counts as "zspage is in use" but READ access to the same zspage does not
> > > count as "zspage is in use".

> Nonetheless, the fact that we refaulted an object in a zspage does not
> necessarily mean that other objects on the same are hotter than
> objects in other zspages IIUC.

Yes.

On allocation, we know that there is at least one hot object in the
page. On refault, the connection between objects in a page is weak.

And it's weaker on zsmalloc than with other backends due to the many
size classes making temporal grouping less likely. So I think you're
quite right, Segey, that a per-class LRU would be more accurate.

It's no-LRU < zspage-LRU < class-LRU < object-LRU.

Like Yosry said, the plan is to implement an object-LRU next as part
of the generalized LRU for zsmalloc, zbud and z3fold.

For now, the zspage LRU is an improvement to no-LRU. Our production
experiments confirmed that.