Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm, vmscan: do not overestimate anonymous reclaimable pages

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Tue Nov 24 2015 - 08:37:22 EST


On Tue 24-11-15 16:07:40, Vladimir Davydov wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 12:55:00PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > zone_reclaimable_pages considers all anonymous pages on LRUs reclaimable
> > if there is at least one entry on the swap storage left. This can be
> > really misleading when the swap is short on space and skew reclaim
> > decisions based on zone_reclaimable_pages. Fix this by clamping the
> > number to the minimum of the available swap space and anon LRU pages.
>
> Suppose there's 100M of swap and 1G of anon pages. This patch makes
> zone_reclaimable_pages return 100M instead of 1G in this case. If you
> rotate 600M of oldest anon pages, which is quite possible,
> zone_reclaimable will start returning false, which is wrong, because
> there are still 400M pages that were not even scanned, besides those
> 600M of rotated pages could have become reclaimable after their ref bits
> got cleared.

Uhm, OK, I guess you are right. Making zone_reclaimable less
conservative can lead to hard to expect results. Scratch this patch
please.

> I think it is the name of zone_reclaimable_pages which is misleading. It
> should be called something like "zone_scannable_pages" judging by how it
> is used in zone_reclaimable.

Thanks!
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
--
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/