Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:45:36 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Elladan <elladan@eskimo.com>
Cc: riel@redhat.com, peterz@infradead.org, elladan@eskimo.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, tytso@mit.edu,
       kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com, linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] vmscan: evict use-once pages first (v2)
Message-Id: <20090430174536.d0f438dd.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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On Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:20:58 -0700
Elladan <elladan@eskimo.com> wrote:

> > Elladan, does this smaller patch still work as expected?
> 
> Rik, since the third patch doesn't work on 2.6.28 (without disabling a lot of
> code), I went ahead and tested this patch.
> 
> The system does seem relatively responsive with this patch for the most part,
> with occasional lag.  I don't see much evidence at least over the course of a
> few minutes that it pages out applications significantly.  It seems about
> equivalent to the first patch.
> 
> Given Andrew Morton's request that I track the Mapped: field in /proc/meminfo,
> I went ahead and did that with this patch built into a kernel.  Compared to the
> standard Ubuntu kernel, this patch keeps significantly more Mapped memory
> around, and it shrinks at a slower rate after the test runs for a while.
> Eventually, it seems to reach a steady state.
> 
> For example, with your patch, Mapped will often go for 30 seconds without
> changing significantly.  Without your patch, it continuously lost about
> 500-1000K every 5 seconds, and then jumped up again significantly when I
> touched Firefox or other applications.  I do see some of that behavior with
> your patch too, but it's much less significant.

Were you able to tell whether altering /proc/sys/vm/swappiness appropriately
regulated the rate at which the mapped page count decreased?

Thanks.
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