Prior to the commit 7e1c0d6f ("memcg: switch lruvec stats to rstat")
and the commit aa48e47e ("memcg: infrastructure to flush memcg
stats"), each lruvec memcg stats can be off by (nr_cgroups * nr_cpus *
32) at worst and for unbounded amount of time.  The commit aa48e47e
moved the lruvec stats to rstat infrastructure and the commit
7e1c0d6f bounded the error for all the lruvec stats to (nr_cpus *
32) at worst for at most 2 seconds.  More specifically it decoupled the
number of stats and the number of cgroups from the error rate.

However this reduction in error comes with the cost of triggering the
slowpath of stats update more frequently.  Previously in the slowpath
the kernel adds the stats up the memcg tree.  After aa48e47e, the
kernel triggers the asyn lruvec stats flush through queue_work().  This
causes regression reports from 0day kernel bot [1] as well as from
phoronix test suite [2].

We tried two options to fix the regression:

 1) Increase the threshold to trigger the slowpath in lruvec stats
    update codepath from 32 to 512.

 2) Remove the slowpath from lruvec stats update codepath and instead
    flush the stats in the page refault codepath. The assumption is that
    the kernel timely flush the stats, so, the update tree would be
    small in the refault codepath to not cause the preformance impact.

Following are the results of will-it-scale/page_fault[1|2|3] benchmark
on four settings i.e.  (1) 5.15-rc1 as baseline (2) 5.15-rc1 with
aa48e47e and 7e1c0d6f reverted (3) 5.15-rc1 with option-1
(4) 5.15-rc1 with option-2.

  test       (1)      (2)               (3)               (4)
  pg_f1   368563   406277 (10.23%)   399693  (8.44%)   416398 (12.97%)
  pg_f2   338399   372133  (9.96%)   369180  (9.09%)   381024 (12.59%)
  pg_f3   500853   575399 (14.88%)   570388 (13.88%)   576083 (15.02%)

From the above result, it seems like the option-2 not only solves the
regression but also improves the performance for at least these
benchmarks.

Feng Tang (intel) ran the aim7 benchmark with these two options and
confirms that option-1 reduces the regression but option-2 removes the
regression.

Michael Larabel (phoronix) ran multiple benchmarks with these options
and reported the results at [3] and it shows for most benchmarks
option-2 removes the regression introduced by the commit aa48e47e
("memcg: infrastructure to flush memcg stats").

Based on the experiment results, this patch proposed the option-2 as the
solution to resolve the regression.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20210726022421.GB21872@xsang-OptiPlex-9020 [1]
Link: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux515-compile-regress [2]
Link: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2109226-DEBU-LINUX5104 [3]
Fixes: aa48e47e ("memcg: infrastructure to flush memcg stats")
Signed-off-by: NShakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Tested-by: NMichael Larabel <Michael@phoronix.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Cc: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Hillf Danton <hdanton@sina.com>,
Cc: Michal Koutný <mkoutny@suse.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>