In very high throughput workloads, the inactive scan can become overwhelmed
as you have many cores producing pages and a single core freeing. Since
Mark's introduction of batched pagequeue operations, we can now run multiple
inactive threads working on independent batches.
To avoid confusing the pid and other control algorithms, I (Jeff) do this in
a mpi-like fan out and collect model that is driven from the primary page
daemon. It decides whether the shortfall can be overcome with a single
thread and if not dispatches multiple threads and waits for their results.
The heuristic is based on timing the pageout activity and averaging a
pages-per-second variable which is exponentially decayed. This is visible in
sysctl and may be interesting for other purposes.
I (Jeff) have verified that this does indeed double our paging throughput
when used with two threads. With four we tend to run into other contention
problems. For now I would like to commit this infrastructure with only a
single thread enabled.
The number of worker threads per domain can be controlled with the
'vm.pageout_threads_per_domain' tunable.
Submitted by: jeff (earlier version)
Discussed with: markj
Tested by: pho
Sponsored by: probably Netflix (based on contemporary commits)
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D21629
0292c54bdb