Re: [PATCH 06/10] vmscan: Narrow the scenarios lumpy reclaim usessynchrounous reclaim

From: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Date: Wed Sep 08 2010 - 23:19:42 EST


On Mon, 6 Sep 2010 11:47:29 +0100
Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> shrink_page_list() can decide to give up reclaiming a page under a
> number of conditions such as
>
> 1. trylock_page() failure
> 2. page is unevictable
> 3. zone reclaim and page is mapped
> 4. PageWriteback() is true
> 5. page is swapbacked and swap is full
> 6. add_to_swap() failure
> 7. page is dirty and gfpmask don't have GFP_IO, GFP_FS
> 8. page is pinned
> 9. IO queue is congested
> 10. pageout() start IO, but not finished
>
> When lumpy reclaim, all of failure result in entering synchronous lumpy
> reclaim but this can be unnecessary. In cases (2), (3), (5), (6), (7) and
> (8), there is no point retrying. This patch causes lumpy reclaim to abort
> when it is known it will fail.
>
> Case (9) is more interesting. current behavior is,
> 1. start shrink_page_list(async)
> 2. found queue_congested()
> 3. skip pageout write
> 4. still start shrink_page_list(sync)
> 5. wait on a lot of pages
> 6. again, found queue_congested()
> 7. give up pageout write again
>
> So, it's meaningless time wasting. However, just skipping page reclaim is
> also not a good as as x86 allocating a huge page needs 512 pages for example.
> It can have more dirty pages than queue congestion threshold (~=128).
>
> After this patch, pageout() behaves as follows;
>
> - If order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER
> Ignore queue congestion always.
> - If order <= PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER
> skip write page and disable lumpy reclaim.
>
> Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx>

seems nice.
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


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