Re: [RPC][PATCH 2.6.20-rc5] limit total vfs page cache

From: Aubrey Li
Date: Fri Jan 19 2007 - 11:05:43 EST


On 1/19/07, Vaidyanathan Srinivasan <svaidy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Hi Aubrey,

The idea of creating separate flag for pagecache in page_alloc is
interesting. The good part is that you flag watermark low and the
zone reclaimer will do the rest of the job.

However when the zone reclaimer starts to reclaim pages, it will
remove all cold pages and not specifically pagecache pages. This
may affect performance of applications.

One possible solution to this reclaim is to use scan control fields
and ask the shrink_page_list() and shrink_active_list() routines to
target only pagecache pages. Pagecache pages are not mapped and
they are easy to find on the LRU list.

Please review my patch at http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/01/17/96


So you mean the existing reclaimer has the same issue, doesn't it?
In your and Roy's patch, balance_pagecache() routine is called on file
backed access.
So you still want to add this checking? or change the current
reclaimer completely?

-Aubrey
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