From: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] mm: slub: Default slub_max_order to 0
Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 19:46:41 +0200
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Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>,
        Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Colin King <colin.king@canonical.com>,
        Raghavendra D Prabhu <raghu.prabhu13@gmail.com>,
        Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>, Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>,
        Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>, Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-ext4 <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>
To: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
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On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 11:48:19AM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> Try order = 1 which gives you SLAB like interaction with the page
> allocator. Then we at least know that it is the order 2 and 3 allocs that
> are the problem and not something else.

order 1 should work better, because it's less likely we end up here
(which leaves RECLAIM_MODE_LUMPYRECLAIM on and then see what happens
at the top of page_check_references())

   else if (sc->order && priority < DEF_PRIORITY - 2)
   	sc->reclaim_mode |= syncmode;

with order 1 more likely we end up here as enough pages are freed for
order 1 and we're safe:

     else
	sc->reclaim_mode = RECLAIM_MODE_SINGLE | RECLAIM_MODE_ASYNC;

None of these issue should materialize with COMPACTION=n. Even
__GFP_WAIT can be left enabled to run compaction without expecting
adverse behavior, but running compaction may still not be worth it for
small systems where the benefit of having order 1/2/3 allocation may
not outweight the cost of compaction itself.

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