When starting a memory hog task, a desktop box w/o swap is found to go
unresponsive for a long time. It's solely caused by lots of congestion
waits in throttle_vm_writeout():
gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073384: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073386: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000
gtali-4237 553.080377: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
gtali-4237 553.080378: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000
Xorg-3483 553.103375: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
Xorg-3483 553.103377: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000
The root cause is, the dirty threshold is knocked down a lot by the
memory hog task. Fixed by using global_dirty_limit which decreases
gradually on such events and can guarantee we stay above (the also
decreasing) nr_dirty in the progress of following down to the new
dirty threshold.
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu<fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx>