[RFC][PATCH 0/7] mm: Batch page reclamation under shink_page_list

From: Dave Hansen
Date: Tue May 07 2013 - 17:20:02 EST


These are an update of Tim Chen's earlier work:

http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1347293960.9977.70.camel@schen9-DESK

I broke the patches up a bit more, and tried to incorporate some
changes based on some feedback from Mel and Andrew.

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To do page reclamation in shrink_page_list function, there are
two locks taken on a page by page basis. One is the tree lock
protecting the radix tree of the page mapping and the other is
the mapping->i_mmap_mutex protecting the mapped pages. This set
deals only with mapping->tree_lock.

Tim managed to get 14% throughput improvement when with a workload
putting heavy pressure of page cache by reading many large mmaped
files simultaneously on a 8 socket Westmere server.

I've been testing these by running large parallel kernel compiles
on systems that are under memory pressure. During development,
I caught quite a few races on smaller setups, and it's being
quite stable that large (160 logical CPU / 1TB) system.
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