Re: [rfc 2/3] mm: vmscan: treat inactive cycling as neutral

[KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:06:28 +0100
Johannes Weiner <jweiner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 11:34:17AM +0900, KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki wrote:
> > On Wed, 2 Nov 2011 17:32:13 +0100
> > Johannes Weiner <jweiner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > > Each page that is scanned but put back to the inactive list is counted
> > > as a successful reclaim, which tips the balance between file and anon
> > > lists more towards the cycling list.
> > > 
> > > This does - in my opinion - not make too much sense, but at the same
> > > time it was not much of a problem, as the conditions that lead to an
> > > inactive list cycle were mostly temporary - locked page, concurrent
> > > page table changes, backing device congested - or at least limited to
> > > a single reclaimer that was not allowed to unmap or meddle with IO.
> > > More important than being moderately rare, those conditions should
> > > apply to both anon and mapped file pages equally and balance out in
> > > the end.
> > > 
> > > Recently, we started cycling file pages in particular on the inactive
> > > list much more aggressively, for used-once detection of mapped pages,
> > > and when avoiding writeback from direct reclaim.
> > > 
> > > Those rotated pages do not exactly speak for the reclaimability of the
> > > list they sit on and we risk putting immense pressure on file list for
> > > no good reason.
> > > 
> > > Instead, count each page not reclaimed and put back to any list,
> > > active or inactive, as rotated, so they are neutral with respect to
> > > the scan/rotate ratio of the list class, as they should be.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > I think this makes sense.
> > 
> > Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > I wonder it may be better to have victim list for written-backed pages..
> 
> Do you mean an extra LRU list that holds dirty pages?

an extra LRU for pages PG_reclaim ? 

THanks,
-Kame

--
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/