2008-01-29 15:52:48

by Miklos Szeredi

Subject: [patch 1/6] mm: bdi: tweak task dirty penalty

From: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>

Penalizing heavy dirtiers with 1/8-th the total dirty limit might be rather
excessive on large memory machines. Use sqrt to scale it sub-linearly.

Update the comment while we're there.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <[email protected]>
---

Index: linux/mm/page-writeback.c
===================================================================
--- linux.orig/mm/page-writeback.c 2008-01-17 19:00:56.000000000 +0100
+++ linux/mm/page-writeback.c 2008-01-18 13:07:16.000000000 +0100
@@ -219,17 +219,21 @@ static inline void task_dirties_fraction
}

/*
- * scale the dirty limit
+ * Task specific dirty limit:
*
- * task specific dirty limit:
+ * dirty -= 8 * sqrt(dirty) * p_{t}
*
- * dirty -= (dirty/8) * p_{t}
+ * Penalize tasks that dirty a lot of pages by lowering their dirty limit. This
+ * avoids infrequent dirtiers from getting stuck in this other guys dirty
+ * pages.
+ *
+ * Use a sub-linear function to scale the penalty, we only need a little room.
*/
static void task_dirty_limit(struct task_struct *tsk, long *pdirty)
{
long numerator, denominator;
long dirty = *pdirty;
- u64 inv = dirty >> 3;
+ u64 inv = 8*int_sqrt(dirty);

task_dirties_fraction(tsk, &numerator, &denominator);
inv *= numerator;

--

2008-01-31 00:14:20

by Andrew Morton

Subject: Re: [patch 1/6] mm: bdi: tweak task dirty penalty

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:49:01 +0100
Miklos Szeredi <[email protected]> wrote:

> Penalizing heavy dirtiers with 1/8-th the total dirty limit might be rather
> excessive on large memory machines. Use sqrt to scale it sub-linearly.

Then again, it might not be.

I'll skip this one. Please resend if/when it is proven to be a net benefit
across a broad range of workloads. And stuff like that.