Re: Page cache write performance issue

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Oct 13 2004 - 22:24:28 EST


Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 01:39:41AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Nick Piggin <piggin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > Andrew probably has better ideas.
> >
> > uh, is this an ia32 highmem box?
>
> Yep, it is.
>
> > If so, you've hit the VM sour spot.
> > ...
> > Basically, *any* other config is fine. 896MB and below, 1.5GB and above.
>
> I just tried switching CONFIG_HIGHMEM off, and so running the
> machine with 512MB; then adjusted the test to write 256M into
> the page cache, again in 1K sequential chunks. A similar mis-
> behaviour happens, though the numbers are slightly better (up
> from ~4 to ~6.5MB/sec). Both ext2 and xfs see this. When I
> drop the file size down to 128M with this kernel, I see good
> results again (as we'd expect).

No such problem here, with

dd if=/dev/zero of=x bs=1k count=128k

on a 256MB machine. xfs and ext2.

Can you exhibit this one more than one machine?

Silly question: what does `grep sync' /etc/fstab say over there? ;)
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