Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2004 10:24:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
To: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>, akpm@osdl.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/3] beat kswapd with the proverbial clue-bat
In-Reply-To: <413AE6E7.5070103@yahoo.com.au>
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 <413AAF49.5070600@yahoo.com.au> <413AE6E7.5070103@yahoo.com.au>
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On Sun, 5 Sep 2004, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
> Hmm, and the crowning argument for not stopping at order 3 is that if we
> never use higher order allocations, nothing will care about their watermarks
> anyway. I think I had myself confused when that question in the first place.
> 
> So yeah, stopping at a fixed number isn't required, and as you say it keeps
> things general and special cases minimal.

Hey, please refute my "you need 20% free" to get even to order-3 for most
cases first.

It's probably acceptable to have a _very_ backgrounded job that does
freeing if order-3 isn't available, but it had better be pretty
slow-moving, I suspect. On the order of "It's probably ok to try to aim
for up to 25% free 'overnight' if the machine is idle" but it's almost
certainly not ok to aggressively push things out to that degree..

		Linus
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