Re: BUG: Slowdown on 3000 socket-machines tracked down

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Sun Mar 06 2005 - 19:49:27 EST


Christian Schmid wrote:

Today I tested with 5000 sockets. The problem is the same like above but the more sockets there come, it just doesnt claim more bandwidth as it SHOULD of course do. It seems it doesn't slow down but it just doesnt scale anymore. The badwidth doesnt go over 80 MB/Sec, no matter what I do. Then I did the following: I raised lower_zone_protection to 1024 (above I did 1024000 which is bullshit but it doesnt matter as it seems to just protect the whole low-mem which is what I want) and it was at 80 MB. then I lowered to 0 again and suddenly it peaked up to full bandwidth (100 MB) for about 5 seconds until the whole protected area was in use. Then it slowed down drastically again.

This confirms my suspicion that lowmem / highmem scanning is not
properly balanced. When you raise lower_zone_protection a great
deal, lowmem is no longer used for pagecache, and your problem
goes away.

I gave you a patch to try for this - unfortunately I can't make
much more progress than that if I don't have a test case and you
can't test patches :\

Nick

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/