Re: Page cache write performance issue

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Thu Oct 14 2004 - 03:03:24 EST


Nathan Scott wrote:
On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 08:20:41PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I just tried switching CONFIG_HIGHMEM off, and so running the
machine with 512MB; then adjusted the test to write 256M into
the page cache, again in 1K sequential chunks. A similar mis-
behaviour happens, though the numbers are slightly better (up
from ~4 to ~6.5MB/sec). Both ext2 and xfs see this. When I
drop the file size down to 128M with this kernel, I see good
results again (as we'd expect).

No such problem here, with

dd if=/dev/zero of=x bs=1k count=128k

on a 256MB machine. xfs and ext2.


Yup, rebooted with mem=128M and on my box, & that crawls.
Maybe its just this old hunk 'o junk, I suppose; odd that
2.6.8 was OK with this though.


Just out of interest, can you get profiles and a few lines
of vmstat 1 from 2.6.8 and 2.6.9-rc, please?
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