Re: [PATCH] mm: wait for congestion to clear on all zones

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Jan 09 2013 - 16:48:06 EST


On Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:41:48 +0100
Zlatko Calusic <zlatko.calusic@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Currently we take a short nap (HZ/10) and wait for congestion to clear
> before taking another pass with lower priority in balance_pgdat(). But
> we do that only for the highest zone that we encounter is unbalanced
> and congested.
>
> This patch changes that to wait on all congested zones in a single
> pass in the hope that it will save us some scanning that way. Also we
> take a nap as soon as congested zone is encountered and sc.priority <
> DEF_PRIORITY - 2 (aka kswapd in trouble).
>
> ...
>
> The patch is against the mm tree. Make sure that
> mm-avoid-calling-pgdat_balanced-needlessly.patch is applied first (not
> yet in the mmotm tree). Tested on half a dozen systems with different
> workloads for the last few days, working really well!

But what are the user-observable effcets of this change? Less kernel
CPU consumption, presumably? Did you quantify it?

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