Re: [PATCH v4 -mm] make swapin readahead skip over holes

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Wed Jan 25 2012 - 05:51:48 EST


On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 02:14:00PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
> Ever since abandoning the virtual scan of processes, for scalability
> reasons, swap space has been a little more fragmented than before.
> This can lead to the situation where a large memory user is killed,
> swap space ends up full of "holes" and swapin readahead is totally
> ineffective.
>
> On my home system, after killing a leaky firefox it took over an
> hour to page just under 2GB of memory back in, slowing the virtual
> machines down to a crawl.
>
> This patch makes swapin readahead simply skip over holes, instead
> of stopping at them. This allows the system to swap things back in
> at rates of several MB/second, instead of a few hundred kB/second.
>
> The checks done in valid_swaphandles are already done in
> read_swap_cache_async as well, allowing us to remove a fair amount
> of code.
>
> Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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