Re: [PATCH 0/2] Disable zone_reclaim_mode by default

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Wed Apr 09 2014 - 09:08:41 EST


On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 03:56:49PM -0400, Josh Berkus wrote:
> On 04/08/2014 03:53 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> > In an ideal world, the kernel would put the hottest pages on the local
> > node and the less-hot pages on remote nodes, moving pages around as
> > the workload shifts. In practice, that's probably pretty hard.
> > Fortunately, it's not nearly as important as making sure we don't
> > unnecessarily hit the disk, which is infinitely slower than any memory
> > bank.
>
> Even if the kernel could do this, we would *still* have to disable it
> for PostgreSQL, since our double-buffering makes our pages look "cold"
> to the kernel ... as discussed.
>

If it's the shared mapping that is being used then automatic NUMA
balancing should migrate those pages to a node local to the CPU
accessing it but how well it works will partially depend on how much
those accesses move around. It's independent of the zone_reclaim_mode
issue.

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
--
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/