Re: [FIX PATCH 2/2] mm/page_alloc: Use accumulated load when building node fallback list

[Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@arm.com>]

On 8/30/21 5:46 PM, Bharata B Rao wrote:
> As an example, consider a 4 node system with the following distance
> matrix.
> 
> Node 0  1  2  3
> ----------------
> 0    10 12 32 32
> 1    12 10 32 32
> 2    32 32 10 12
> 3    32 32 12 10
> 
> For this case, the node fallback list gets built like this:
> 
> Node	Fallback list
> ---------------------
> 0	0 1 2 3
> 1	1 0 3 2
> 2	2 3 0 1
> 3	3 2 0 1 <-- Unexpected fallback order
> 
> In the fallback list for nodes 2 and 3, the nodes 0 and 1
> appear in the same order which results in more allocations
> getting satisfied from node 0 compared to node 1.
> 
> The effect of this on remote memory bandwidth as seen by stream
> benchmark is shown below:
> 
> Case 1: Bandwidth from cores on nodes 2 & 3 to memory on nodes 0 & 1
> 	(numactl -m 0,1 ./stream_lowOverhead ... --cores <from 2, 3>)
> Case 2: Bandwidth from cores on nodes 0 & 1 to memory on nodes 2 & 3
> 	(numactl -m 2,3 ./stream_lowOverhead ... --cores <from 0, 1>)
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> 		BANDWIDTH (MB/s)
>     TEST	Case 1		Case 2
> ----------------------------------------
>     COPY	57479.6		110791.8
>    SCALE	55372.9		105685.9
>      ADD	50460.6		96734.2
>   TRIADD	50397.6		97119.1
> ----------------------------------------
> 
> The bandwidth drop in Case 1 occurs because most of the allocations
> get satisfied by node 0 as it appears first in the fallback order
> for both nodes 2 and 3.

I am wondering what causes this performance drop here ? Would not the memory
access latency be similar between {2, 3} --->  { 0 } and {2, 3} --->  { 1 },
given both these nodes {0, 1} have same distance from {2, 3} i.e 32 from the
above distance matrix. Even if the preferred node order changes from { 0 } to
{ 1 } for the accessing node { 3 }, it should not change the latency as such.

Is the performance drop here, is caused by excessive allocation on node { 0 }
resulting from page allocation latency instead.