Re: [patch] vm early reclaim orphaned pages

[Nick Piggin]

On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 20:34 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >  We have workloads where orphaned pages build up and appear to slow
> >  the system down when it starts reclaiming memory.
> > 
> >  Stripping the referenced bit from orphaned pages and putting them
> >  on the end of the inactive list should help improve reclaim.
> 
> Presumably if do_invalidatepage() failed, there's some reason why this page
> is not reclaimable (eg, JBD is still dinking with it).  Hence there's a
> very good chance that kswapd won't be able to reclaim it either.
> 

Yeah that is a problem I was worried about. Perhaps just stripping
PageReferenced and putting it on the *front* of the inactive list
would be better?

> Adding some instrumentation would be useful: set some new page flag on
> these pages and then accumulate the success/failure stats in vmscan.c, see
> what they say.
> 

OK.

[snip patch]

> A standalone function in swap.c would be nicer.

Will do. Thanks.


-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.



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