Re: [PATCH v6] zswap: memcontrol: implement zswap writeback disabling

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Fri Dec 08 2023 - 14:57:37 EST


On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 16:42:59 -0800 Nhat Pham <nphamcs@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >
> > Also, it would be quite helpful of the changelog were to give us some
> > idea of how important this tunable is. What sort of throughput
> > differences might it cause and under what circumstances?
>
> For the most part, this feature is motivated by internal parties who
> have already established their opinions regarding swapping - the
> workloads that are highly sensitive to IO, and especially those who
> are using servers with really slow disk performance (for instance,
> massive but slow HDDs). For these folks, it's impossible to convince
> them to even entertain zswap if swapping also comes as a packaged
> deal. Writeback disabling is quite a useful feature in these
> situations - on a mixed workloads deployment, they can disable
> writeback for the more IO-sensitive workloads, and enable writeback
> for other background workloads.
>
> (Maybe we should include the paragraph above as part of the changelog?)

I pasted it in, thanks.