Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:43:51 +0530
From: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
To: Chris Webb <chris@arachsys.com>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>,
        Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>,
        KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Subject: Re: Over-eager swapping
Message-ID: <20100819151351.GA23611@balbir.in.ibm.com>
Reply-To: balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com
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 <20100819092536.GH2370@arachsys.com>
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* Chris Webb <chris@arachsys.com> [2010-08-19 10:25:36]:

> Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> 
> > Can you give an idea of what the meminfo inside the guest looks like.
> 
> Sorry for the slow reply here. Unfortunately not, as these guests are run on
> behalf of customers. They install them with operating systems of their
> choice, and run them on our service.
>

Thanks for clarifying.
 
> > Have you looked at
> > http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2010/6/8/4580772
> 
> Yes, I've been watching this discussions with interest. Our application is
> one where we have little to no control over what goes on inside the guests,
> but these sorts of things definitely make sense where the two are under the
> same administrative control.
>

Not necessarily, in some cases you can use a guest that uses lesser
page cache, but that might not matter in your case at the moment.
 
> > Do we have reason to believe the problem can be solved entirely in the
> > host?
> 
> It's not clear to me why this should be difficult, given that the total size
> of vm allocated to guests (and system processes) is always strictly less
> than the total amount of RAM available in the host. I do understand that it
> won't allow for as impressive overcommit (except by ksm) or be as efficient,
> because file-backed guest pages won't get evicted by pressure in the host as
> they are indistinguishable from anonymous pages.
>
> After all, a solution that isn't ideal, but does work, is to turn off swap
> completely! This is what we've been doing to date. The only problem with
> this is that we can't dip into swap in an emergency if there's no swap there
> at all.

If you are not overcommitting it should work, in my experiments I've
seen a lot of memory used by the host as page cache on behalf of the
guest. I've done my experiments using cgroups to identify accurate
usage.

-- 
	Three Cheers,
	Balbir
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