Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756550Ab0FNVOc (ORCPT ); Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:14:32 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:34278 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756300Ab0FNVOb (ORCPT ); Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:14:31 -0400 Message-ID: <4C169B81.8010707@redhat.com> Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:13:37 -0400 From: Rik van Riel User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100430 Fedora/3.0.4-2.fc12 Lightning/1.0b2pre Thunderbird/3.0.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mel Gorman CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Dave Chinner , Chris Mason , Nick Piggin , Johannes Weiner , Christoph Hellwig , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki , Andrew Morton Subject: Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch References: <1276514273-27693-1-git-send-email-mel@csn.ul.ie> <1276514273-27693-12-git-send-email-mel@csn.ul.ie> In-Reply-To: <1276514273-27693-12-git-send-email-mel@csn.ul.ie> 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: 1262 Lines: 29 On 06/14/2010 07:17 AM, Mel Gorman wrote: > Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from > the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed > soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want > to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem > perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky > IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to > clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise. Reclaiming clean pages should be fast enough that this should make little, if any, difference. > This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that > the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch > that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward. However, this is a convincing argument :) > 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/