Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:11:58 +0100
From: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
To: Jeffrey Hundstad <jeffrey.hundstad@mnsu.edu>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Steven Barrett <damentz@liquorix.net>,
        Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss@gmail.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>, Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>,
        Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>,
        KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>,
        Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>, Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>,
        Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 0/4] fadvise(DONTNEED) support
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On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:03:51AM -0600, Jeffrey Hundstad wrote:
> On 02/22/2011 07:28 AM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > Hi Minchan,
> > That's my point, we should check if the "thrashing horribly" is really
> > a "recently" or if it has always happened before with 2.6.18 and previous.
> 
> I would bet that "thrashing" isn't what he meant.  He almost certainly 
> meant "needless I/O" and nothing to do with swapping.  I've seen this 
> similar report before.  This report is almost always gets answered with 
> a "set your swappiness to an appropriate value" type answer.  Or a "your 

Hmm but swappiness can't help if "needless I/O in the morning after
backup" is the problem. So it wouldn't be the right suggestion if
"needless I/O is the problem".

We need a "vmstat 1" during the "trashing horribly"/"needless I/O" in
the morning to be sure.

> userspace app needs to get smarter" type answer.  I think they are 
> trying to do the latter, but need some help from the kernel, and that's 
> what they're trying to do here.

That's fine thing. But I got reports indipendent of this thread from
friends, asking me how to prevent swapping overnight because of
backup, so I connected that report to the above "trashing
horribly"/recently. I had no problems personally but may backup runs
once (not twice to activate/reference pages). I had no time to
investigate this further yet to see if things works ok for me even
with a rsync loop activating and referencing everything.
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