Re: [PATCH] mm: swap prefetch improvements

From: Con Kolivas
Date: Tue May 22 2007 - 06:39:16 EST


On Tuesday 22 May 2007 20:25, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Con Kolivas <kernel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > there was nothing else running on the system - so i suspect the
> > > > swapin activity flagged 'itself' as some 'other' activity and
> > > > stopped? The swapins happened in 4 bursts, separated by 5 seconds
> > > > total idleness.
> > >
> > > I've noted burst swapins separated by some seconds of pause in my
> > > desktop system too (with sp_tester and an idle gnome).
> >
> > That really is expected, as just about anything, including journal
> > writeout, would be enough to put it back to sleep for 5 more seconds.
>
> note that nothing like that happened on my system - in the
> swap-prefetch-off case there was _zero_ IO activity during the sleep
> period.

Ok, granted it's _very_ conservative. I really don't want to risk its presence
being a burden on anything, and the iowait it induces probably makes it turn
itself off for another PREFETCH_DELAY (5s). I really don't want to cross the
line to where it is detrimental in any way. Not dropping out on a
cond_resched and perhaps making the delay tunable should be enough to make it
a little less "sleepy".

--
-ck
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/