Re: numa involved in instability and swap usage despite RAM free?

From: Mark Millard <marklmi_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 13:07:00 -0700
Alexander Leidinger Alexander at leidinger.net wrote on
Sun Jun 24 10:03:49 UTC 2018 :

> Short:
> Can it be that enabling numa in the kernel is the reason why some  
> people see instability with zfs and usage of swap while a lot of free  
> RAM is available?

[It will likely be a few months before I again have access to the
environment these notes are based on. It has been about a month
since I last had access.]

On a AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X (16 cores, 2 HW threads per core)
I enabled:

options         NUMA
options         MAXMEMDOM=2

in fairly recent times. This is a UFS context, not a ZFS one. I'd
not been explicitly controlling how things run (so using defaults).
This is head with debugging disabled (via including GENERIC and
overriding).

I did not have the swap usage problem with doing many buildworld
buildkernel (self hosted and the cross builds for several targets).
Nor when did a poudriere bulk -a (with ALLOW_MAKE_JOBS=yes ). This
was a FreeBSD native boot context at the time. (I usually have run
the same drives under Hyper-V but have not seen the problem there
either.) For native FreeBSD I used -j32 (in buildworld/buildkernel
terms but also for the bulk -a) and for under-Hyper-V I used -j28 .
96 GiBytes of ECC RAM total (48 GiBytes/NUMA-node).

I'm not sure how common NUMA being enabled is, nor how common
various MAXMEMDOM settings are. I'd not be surprised if various
folks reporting problems had not explicitly enabled NUMA, nor
set some explicit MAXMEMDOM figure.

It may be that they all have ZFS in common in fairly recent times.

(I'm ignoring examples of long-latency I/O on the same device as
some swap partitions that are in use: this gets into Out Of Memory
process killing without the swap being mostly used. Some reports
of swap problems have this sort of issue involved on small systems
unlikely to be using ZFS.)


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)
Received on Sun Jun 24 2018 - 18:07:14 UTC

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