Re: [PATCH 09/11] mm: vmscan: When reclaiming for compaction, ensurethere are sufficient free pages available

From: Rik van Riel
Date: Thu Dec 15 2011 - 23:36:09 EST


On 12/14/2011 10:41 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
In commit [e0887c19: vmscan: limit direct reclaim for higher order
allocations], Rik noted that reclaim was too aggressive when THP was
enabled. In his initial patch he used the number of free pages to
decide if reclaim should abort for compaction. My feedback was that
reclaim and compaction should be using the same logic when deciding if
reclaim should be aborted.

Unfortunately, this had the effect of reducing THP success rates when
the workload included something like streaming reads that continually
allocated pages. The window during which compaction could run and return
a THP was too small.

This patch combines Rik's two patches together. compaction_suitable()
is still used to decide if reclaim should be aborted to allow
compaction is used. However, it will also ensure that there is a
reasonable buffer of free pages available. This improves upon the
THP allocation success rates but bounds the number of pages that are
freed for compaction.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman<mgorman@xxxxxxx>

Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel<riel@xxxxxxxxxx>

--
All rights reversed
--
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/