runtime: increase TestPhysicalMemoryUtilization threshold

TestPhysicalMemoryUtilization occasionally fails on some platforms by
only a small margin. The reason for this is that it assumes the
scavenger will always be able to scavenge all the memory that's released
by sweeping, but because of the page cache, there could be free and
unscavenged memory held onto by a P which the scavenger simply cannot
get to.

As a result, if the page cache gets filled completely (512 KiB of free
and unscavenged memory) this could skew a test which expects to
scavenge roughly 8 MiB of memory. More specifically, this is 512 KiB of
memory per P, and if a system is more inclined to bounce around
between Ps (even if there's only one goroutine), this memory can get
"stuck".

Through some experimentation, I found that failures correlated highly
with relatively large amounts of memory ending up in some page cache
(like 60 or 64 pages) on at least one P.

This change changes the test's threshold such that it accounts for the
page cache, and scales up with GOMAXPROCS. Because the test constants
themselves don't change, however, the test must now also bound
GOMAXPROCS such that the threshold doesn't get too high (at which point
the test becomes meaningless).

Fixes #35580.

Change-Id: I6bdb70706de991966a9d28347da830be4a19d3a1
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/208377
Run-TryBot: Michael Knyszek <mknyszek@google.com>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Keith Randall <khr@golang.org>

1 files changed, 28 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/src/runtime/testdata/testprog/gc.go b/src/runtime/testdata/testprog/gc.go
index cca9c4556b..cc16413ef5 100644
--- a/src/runtime/testdata/testprog/gc.go
+++ b/src/runtime/testdata/testprog/gc.go
@@ -147,9 +147,20 @@ func GCPhys() {
 		size    = 4 << 20
 		split   = 64 << 10
 		objects = 2
+
+		// The page cache could hide 64 8-KiB pages from the scavenger today.
+		maxPageCache = (8 << 10) * 64
 	)
 	// Set GOGC so that this test operates under consistent assumptions.
 	debug.SetGCPercent(100)
+	// Reduce GOMAXPROCS down to 4 if it's greater. We need to bound the amount
+	// of memory held in the page cache because the scavenger can't reach it.
+	// The page cache will hold at most maxPageCache of memory per-P, so this
+	// bounds the amount of memory hidden from the scavenger to 4*maxPageCache.
+	procs := runtime.GOMAXPROCS(-1)
+	if procs > 4 {
+		defer runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.GOMAXPROCS(4))
+	}
 	// Save objects which we want to survive, and condemn objects which we don't.
 	// Note that we condemn objects in this way and release them all at once in
 	// order to avoid having the GC start freeing up these objects while the loop
@@ -197,10 +208,22 @@ func GCPhys() {
 	// Since the runtime should scavenge the entirety of the remaining holes,
 	// theoretically there should be no more free and unscavenged memory. However due
 	// to other allocations that happen during this test we may still see some physical
-	// memory over-use. 10% here is an arbitrary but very conservative threshold which
-	// should easily account for any other allocations this test may have done.
+	// memory over-use.
 	overuse := (float64(heapBacked) - float64(stats.HeapAlloc)) / float64(stats.HeapAlloc)
-	if overuse <= 0.10 {
+	// Compute the threshold.
+	//
+	// In theory, this threshold should just be zero, but that's not possible in practice.
+	// Firstly, the runtime's page cache can hide up to maxPageCache of free memory from the
+	// scavenger per P. To account for this, we increase the threshold by the ratio between the
+	// total amount the runtime could hide from the scavenger to the amount of memory we expect
+	// to be able to scavenge here, which is (size-split)*objects. This computation is the crux
+	// GOMAXPROCS above; if GOMAXPROCS is too high the threshold just becomes 100%+ since the
+	// amount of memory being allocated is fixed. Then we add 5% to account for noise, such as
+	// other allocations this test may have performed that we don't explicitly account for The
+	// baseline threshold here is around 11% for GOMAXPROCS=1, capping out at around 30% for
+	// GOMAXPROCS=4.
+	threshold := 0.05 + float64(procs)*maxPageCache/float64((size-split)*objects)
+	if overuse <= threshold {
 		fmt.Println("OK")
 		return
 	}
@@ -210,8 +233,8 @@ func GCPhys() {
 	// In the context of this test, this indicates a large amount of
 	// fragmentation with physical pages that are otherwise unused but not
 	// returned to the OS.
-	fmt.Printf("exceeded physical memory overuse threshold of 10%%: %3.2f%%\n"+
-		"(alloc: %d, goal: %d, sys: %d, rel: %d, objs: %d)\n", overuse*100,
+	fmt.Printf("exceeded physical memory overuse threshold of %3.2f%%: %3.2f%%\n"+
+		"(alloc: %d, goal: %d, sys: %d, rel: %d, objs: %d)\n", threshold*100, overuse*100,
 		stats.HeapAlloc, stats.NextGC, stats.HeapSys, stats.HeapReleased, len(saved))
 	runtime.KeepAlive(saved)
 }