Re: Memory pressure handling with iSCSI

From: Badari Pulavarty
Date: Tue Jul 26 2005 - 16:20:16 EST


On Tue, 2005-07-26 at 12:12 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Can you please reduce the number of filesystems, see if that reduces the
> > dirty levels?
>
> Also, it's conceivable that ext3 is implicated here, so it might be saner
> to perform initial investigation on ext2.
>
> (when kjournald writes back a page via its buffers, the page remains
> "dirty" as far as the VFS is concerned. Later, someone tries to do a
> writepage() on it and we'll discover the buffers' cleanness and the page
> will be cleaned without any I/O being performed. All the throttling
> _should_ work OK in this case. But ext2 is more straightforward.)

ext2 is incredibly better. Machine is very responsive.


# echo 2 > /proc/profile; sleep 5; readprofile -
m /usr/src/*12.3/System.map | sort -nr
28671 total 0.0096
25024 default_idle 521.3333
1987 shrink_zone 0.5285
163 tg3_poll 0.0666
154 unlock_page 2.4062
113 page_referenced 0.3363
106 copy_user_generic 0.3557
98 __wake_up_bit 2.0417
74 release_pages 0.1779
71 page_waitqueue 0.7396
51 tg3_start_xmit 0.0287
39 __make_request 0.0290
36 tcp_ack 0.0048
30 tcp_sendpage 0.0100
30 scsi_request_fn 0.0260
28 tg3_interrupt_tagged 0.0700
27 kmem_cache_alloc 0.4219
23 kmem_cache_free 0.2396
22 rotate_reclaimable_page 0.0859
20 established_get_next 0.0595
20 cond_resched 0.1786
20 __mod_page_state 0.4167
16 tcp_transmit_skb 0.0081
15 memset 0.0781
15 __kfree_skb 0.0521
14 tcp_write_xmit 0.0194
14 handle_IRQ_event 0.1458
12 skb_clone 0.0214
12 kfree 0.0500
12 end_buffer_async_write 0.0469
11 tcp_v4_rcv 0.0041
10 test_set_page_writeback 0.0329


Thanks,
Badari

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
1 56 4 33372 12512 6794560 0 0 142 1451 10283 1632 0 7 0 93
0 56 4 35488 12496 6791996 0 0 131 1762 10335 1583 0 3 0 96
0 56 4 33132 12540 6794532 0 0 1 1320 10228 2082 0 4 0 96
0 56 4 33132 12684 6794388 0 0 35 2054 10414 1973 0 7 0 93
0 56 4 33380 12712 6794876 0 0 0 2676 10635 2739 0 6 0 94
0 56 4 33132 12672 6793368 0 0 2 6799 10240 2617 0 10 0 90
0 56 4 33132 12608 6793948 0 0 0 10525 10249 2945 0 10 0 90
2 56 4 33380 12528 6792996 0 0 1 12566 11081 2813 0 12 0 88
1 55 4 33380 12368 6793672 0 0 1 9206 10237 2608 0 13 0 87
0 56 4 33132 12176 6793348 0 0 0 10939 10156 2744 0 17 0 83
2 59 4 33256 12060 6794496 0 0 5 11706 10464 2746 0 15 0 85
0 56 4 33504 11844 6794196 0 0 0 12196 10525 2835 0 17 0 83
0 56 4 33504 11592 6795480 0 0 0 8656 10463 2692 0 10 0 90
0 56 4 33132 11492 6796612 0 0 1 9022 10222 2496 0 11 0 89
2 55 4 33256 11384 6796720 0 0 0 9661 10830 2813 0 9 0 91