Re: [patch 2/2] mm: page-writeback: do not count anon pages as dirtyablememory

From: Rik van Riel
Date: Fri Jan 24 2014 - 18:26:23 EST


On 01/24/2014 05:03 PM, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> The VM is currently heavily tuned to avoid swapping. Whether that is
> good or bad is a separate discussion, but as long as the VM won't swap
> to make room for dirty cache, we can not consider anonymous pages when
> calculating the amount of dirtyable memory, the baseline to which
> dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio are applied.
>
> A simple workload that occupies a significant size (40+%, depending on
> memory layout, storage speeds etc.) of memory with anon/tmpfs pages
> and uses the remainder for a streaming writer demonstrates this
> problem. In that case, the actual cache pages are a small fraction of
> what is considered dirtyable overall, which results in an relatively
> large portion of the cache pages to be dirtied. As kswapd starts
> rotating these, random tasks enter direct reclaim and stall on IO.
>
> Only consider free pages and file pages dirtyable.
>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>


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