Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754891Ab3CUAxW (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:53:22 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:50706 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752779Ab3CUAxV (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:53:21 -0400 Message-ID: <514A5997.3030802@redhat.com> Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:51:35 -0400 From: Rik van Riel User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130110 Thunderbird/17.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mel Gorman CC: Linux-MM , Jiri Slaby , Valdis Kletnieks , Zlatko Calusic , Johannes Weiner , dormando , Satoru Moriya , Michal Hocko , LKML Subject: Re: [PATCH 01/10] mm: vmscan: Limit the number of pages kswapd reclaims at each priority References: <1363525456-10448-1-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de> <1363525456-10448-2-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de> In-Reply-To: <1363525456-10448-2-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1583 Lines: 31 On 03/17/2013 09:04 AM, Mel Gorman wrote: > The number of pages kswapd can reclaim is bound by the number of pages it > scans which is related to the size of the zone and the scanning priority. In > many cases the priority remains low because it's reset every SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX > reclaimed pages but in the event kswapd scans a large number of pages it > cannot reclaim, it will raise the priority and potentially discard a large > percentage of the zone as sc->nr_to_reclaim is ULONG_MAX. The user-visible > effect is a reclaim "spike" where a large percentage of memory is suddenly > freed. It would be bad enough if this was just unused memory but because > of how anon/file pages are balanced it is possible that applications get > pushed to swap unnecessarily. > > This patch limits the number of pages kswapd will reclaim to the high > watermark. Reclaim will will overshoot due to it not being a hard limit as > shrink_lruvec() will ignore the sc.nr_to_reclaim at DEF_PRIORITY but it > prevents kswapd reclaiming the world at higher priorities. The number of > pages it reclaims is not adjusted for high-order allocations as kswapd will > reclaim excessively if it is to balance zones for high-order allocations. > > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel -- All rights reversed -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/