Re: [PATCH 01/10] mm: vmscan: Limit the number of pages kswapdreclaims at each priority

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Thu Mar 21 2013 - 12:47:46 EST


On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:57:05AM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 01:04:07PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > The number of pages kswapd can reclaim is bound by the number of pages it
> > scans which is related to the size of the zone and the scanning priority. In
> > many cases the priority remains low because it's reset every SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX
> > reclaimed pages but in the event kswapd scans a large number of pages it
> > cannot reclaim, it will raise the priority and potentially discard a large
> > percentage of the zone as sc->nr_to_reclaim is ULONG_MAX. The user-visible
> > effect is a reclaim "spike" where a large percentage of memory is suddenly
> > freed. It would be bad enough if this was just unused memory but because
> > of how anon/file pages are balanced it is possible that applications get
> > pushed to swap unnecessarily.
> >
> > This patch limits the number of pages kswapd will reclaim to the high
> > watermark. Reclaim will will overshoot due to it not being a hard limit as
>
> will -> still?
>
> > shrink_lruvec() will ignore the sc.nr_to_reclaim at DEF_PRIORITY but it
> > prevents kswapd reclaiming the world at higher priorities. The number of
> > pages it reclaims is not adjusted for high-order allocations as kswapd will
> > reclaim excessively if it is to balance zones for high-order allocations.
>
> I don't really understand this last sentence. Is the excessive
> reclaim a result of the patch, a description of what's happening
> now...?
>

It's a very basic description of what happens now and with the patch
applied. Until patch 5 is applied, kswapd can still reclaim the world if
it reaches priority 0.

> > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
>
> Nice, thank you. Using the high watermark for larger zones is more
> reasonable than my hack that just always went with SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX,
> what with inter-zone LRU cycle time balancing and all.
>
> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks.

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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