Re: [patch 2/8] mm: vmscan: disregard swappiness shortly before goingOOM

From: Rik van Riel
Date: Fri Dec 14 2012 - 10:45:17 EST


On 12/14/2012 03:37 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:

I can answer the later. Because memsw comes with its price and
swappiness is much cheaper. On the other hand it makes sense that
swappiness==0 doesn't swap at all. Or do you think we should get back to
_almost_ doesn't swap at all?

swappiness==0 will swap in emergencies, specifically when we have
almost no page cache left, we will still swap things out:

if (global_reclaim(sc)) {
free = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES);
if (unlikely(file + free <= high_wmark_pages(zone))) {
/*
* If we have very few page cache pages, force-scan
* anon pages.
*/
fraction[0] = 1;
fraction[1] = 0;
denominator = 1;
goto out;

This makes sense, because people who set swappiness==0 but
do have swap space available would probably prefer some
emergency swapping over an OOM kill.

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