Re: [PATCH 9/9] mm: compaction: Restart compaction from near whereit left off

[Rafael Aquini]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 11:46:23AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> This is almost entirely based on Rik's previous patches and discussions
> with him about how this might be implemented.
> 
> Order > 0 compaction stops when enough free pages of the correct page
> order have been coalesced.  When doing subsequent higher order allocations,
> it is possible for compaction to be invoked many times.
> 
> However, the compaction code always starts out looking for things to compact
> at the start of the zone, and for free pages to compact things to at the
> end of the zone.
> 
> This can cause quadratic behaviour, with isolate_freepages starting at
> the end of the zone each time, even though previous invocations of the
> compaction code already filled up all free memory on that end of the zone.
> This can cause isolate_freepages to take enormous amounts of CPU with
> certain workloads on larger memory systems.
> 
> This patch caches where the migration and free scanner should start from on
> subsequent compaction invocations using the pageblock-skip information. When
> compaction starts it begins from the cached restart points and will
> update the cached restart points until a page is isolated or a pageblock
> is skipped that would have been scanned by synchronous compaction.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---

Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@xxxxxxxxxx>

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