Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752305Ab3JYIni (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Oct 2013 04:43:38 -0400 Received: from mail-vb0-f45.google.com ([209.85.212.45]:55649 "EHLO mail-vb0-f45.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751464Ab3JYIng (ORCPT ); Fri, 25 Oct 2013 04:43:36 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <1814253454.3449.1382689853825.JavaMail.mail@webmail07> References: <160824051.3072.1382685914055.JavaMail.mail@webmail07> <1814253454.3449.1382689853825.JavaMail.mail@webmail07> Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:43:36 +0100 X-Google-Sender-Auth: hf4643Yk54gwMwzkFtnmMGOjVVc Message-ID: Subject: Re: Disabling in-memory write cache for x86-64 in Linux II From: Linus Torvalds To: "Artem S. Tashkinov" Cc: Wu Fengguang , Andrew Morton , Linux Kernel Mailing List Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1272 Lines: 28 On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Artem S. Tashkinov wrote: > > My feeling is that vm.dirty_ratio/vm.dirty_background_ratio should _not_ be > percentage based, 'cause for PCs/servers with a lot of memory (say 64GB or > more) this value becomes unrealistic (13GB) and I've already had some > unpleasant effects due to it. Right. The percentage notion really goes back to the days when we typically had 8-64 *megabytes* of memory So if you had a 8MB machine you wouldn't want to have more than one megabyte of dirty data, but if you were "Mr Moneybags" and could afford 64MB, you might want to have up to 8MB dirty!! Things have changed. So I would suggest we change the defaults. Or pwehaps make the rule be that "the ratio numbers are 'ratio of memory up to 1GB'", to make the semantics similar across 32-bit HIGHMEM machines and 64-bit machines. The modern way of expressing the dirty limits are to give the actual absolute byte amounts, but we default to the legacy ratio mode.. Linus -- 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/