Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

This is part 6 in a series about Oracle on Opteron-based NUMA servers running Linux. The list of prior installments can be found through my index of NUMA-related posts.

In part 5 of the series I discussed using Opteron-based servers with NUMA features disabled in the BIOS. Running an Opteron server (e.g., HP Proliant DL585) in this fashion is sometimes called SUMA (Sufficiently Uniform Memory Access) or SUMO (Sufficiently Uniform Memory Organization). At the risk of being controversial, I pointed out that in the Oracle Validated Configuration listing for Proliant, the recommendation is given to configure Opteron-based servers as SUMO/SUMA. In my experience, most folks do not change the BIOS and are therefore running a NUMA system since that is the default. However, if steps are taken to disable NUMA on an Opteron system, there are subtleties that warrant deeper understanding. How subtle are the subtleties? That question is the main theme of this blog series.

Memory Latencies with SUMA/SUMO vs NUMA
In part 5 of the series, I used the SLB memory latency workload to show how memory writes differ in NUMA versus SUMA/SUMO. I wrote:

Writing memory on the SUMA configuration in the 8 concurrent memhammer case demonstrated latencies on order of 156ns but dropped 38% to 97ns by switching to NUMA and using the Linux 2.6 NUMA API.

But What About Oracle?
What is the cost of running Oracle on SUMA? The simple answer is, it depends. More architectural background is needed before I go into that.

SUMA, NUMA and CYCLOPS
OK, so SUMA is what you get when you tweak a Proliant Opteron-based server so that memory is interleaved at the low level. Accompanying this with the setting of numa=off in the grub.conf file gets you a completely non-NUMA setup.

Cyclops
NUMA enabled in the BIOS, however, is the default. If the Oracle ports to Linux were NUMA-aware, that would be just fine. However, if the server isn’t configured as a SUMA and you boot Oracle without any consideration for the fact that you are on a NUMA system, you get what I call Cyclops. Let’s take a look at what I mean.

In the following screen shot I have booted an Oracle10g SGA of 7584MB on my Proliant DL585. The system is configured with 32GB physical memory which is, of course, 4 banks of 8GB each attached to one of the 4 dual-core Opterons (nodes). Before booting this SGA, I had between roughly 7.6GB and 7.7GB free memory on each of the memory banks. In the following figure it’s clear that after booting this 7584MB SGA I am left with all but 116MB of memory consumed from node 0 (socket 0)—Cyclops!

NOTE: You may need to right click->view the image

Right, so really bad things can happen if processes that are memory-resident on node 0 try to allocate more memory. In the 2.4 Kernel timeframe Red Hat points out such ill affect as OOM process termination in this web page. I haven’t spent much time researching how 2.6 responds to it because the point of this blog entry to not get into such a situation.

Let’s consider what things are like on a Cyclops even if there are no process or memory allocation failures. Let’s say, for instance, there is a listener with soft node affinity to node 2. All the sessions it forks off will have node affinity to node 2 where they will be granted pages for their kernel structures, page tables, stack, heap and so on. However, the entire SGA is remote memory since as you can see all the memory for the SGA was allocated from node 0. That is, um, not good.

Hugepages Are More Attractive Than Cyclops
Cyclops pops up its ugly single-eyed head only when you are running NUMA (not SUMA/SOMA) and fail to allocate/use hugepages. Whether you allocate hugepages off the grub boot line or out of sysctl.conf, memory for hugepages is allocated in a distributed fashion from the varying memory banks. Did I say round-robin? No. Because I don’t yet know whether it is round-robin or segmented. I have to leave something to blog about in the future.

The following is a screen shot of a session where I allocated 3800 2MB hugepages after the system was booted by echoing that value into /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages. Notice that unlike Cyclops, the pages are allocated for Oracle’s future use in a more distributed fashion from the various memory banks. I then booted Oracle. No Cyclops here.

Interleaving NUMA Memory Allocation
The numactl(8) command supports the notion of pushing memory allocation preferences down to its children. Until such time as the Linux port of Oracle is NUMA-aware internally—as was done in the Sequent DYNIX/ptx, SGI, DG, and to a lesser degree the Solaris Oracle10g port with MPO—the best hopes for efficient memory usage on a commodity NUMA system is to interleave the placement of shared memory via numactl(8). With the SGA allocated in this fashion on a 4-socket NUMA system, Oracle’s memory accesses for the variable and buffer pool components will have locality of up to 25%–generally speaking. Yes, I’m sure some session could go crazy with logical reads of 2 buffers 20,000 times per second or some pathological situation, but I am trying to cover the topic in more general terms. You might wonder how this differs from SUMA/SOMA though.

With SUMA, all memory is interleaved. That means even the NUMA-aware Linux 2.6 kernel cannot exploit the hardware architecture by allocating structures with respect to the memory hierarchies. That is a pure waste. Moreover, with SUMA, 100% of your Oracle memory accesses will hit interleaved memory. That includes PGA. In contrast, properly allocated NUMA-interleaved hugepages results in fairness in the SGA placement, but allocation in the PGA (heap) and stack for the sessions are 100% local memory! That is a good thing. In the following screen shot I coupled numactl(8) memory interleaving with hugepages.

Validated Oracle Configuration
As I pointed out, this Oracle Validated Configuration listing for Proliant recommends turning off NUMA. Now that I’m an HP employee, I’ll have to pursue that a bit because I don’t agree with it at all. You’ll see why when I post my performance measurements contrasting NUMA (with interleave hugepages) to SUMA/SOMA. Look at that Validated Configuration web page closely and you’ll see a recommendation to allow Oracle to use hugepages by tuning /etc/security/limits.conf, but neither allocation of hugepages from the grub boot line nor via the sysctl.conf file!

Could it be that the recommendations in this Validated Configuration were a knee-jerk reaction to Cyclops? I’m not much of a betting man, but I’d wager $5.00 that was the case. Like I said, I’m in HP now…I’ll have to see what all that was about.

Up Next
In my next installment, I will provide Oracle measurements contrasting SUMA and NUMA. I know I’ve said this would be the installment with Oracle performance numbers, but I had to lay too much ground work in this post. The mind can only absorb what the seat can endure.

Patent Infringement
For all you folks that hate the concept of software patents, here’s a good one. When my Sequent colleagues and I were working out the OS-requirements to support our NUMA-optimizations of the Oracle 8 port to Sequent’s NUMA-Q system, we knew early on we’d need a very rich set of enhancements to shmget() for memory region placement. So we specified the requirements to our OS developers. Lo and behold U.S. Patent 6,505,286 plopped out. So, for extra credit, can someone explain to me how the Linux 2.6 libnuma call numa_alloc_onnode() (described here) is not in complete violation of that patent? Hmmm…

Now for a real taste of NUMA-Oracle history, read the following: Sequent_NUMA_Oracle8i