Re: [PATCH] mm: page_alloc: High-order per-cpu page allocator v7

[Christoph Lameter]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2016, Mel Gorman wrote:

> 3.0-era kernels had better fragmentation control, higher success rates at
> allocation etc. I vaguely recall that it had fewer sources of high-order
> allocations but I don't remember specifics and part of that could be the
> lack of THP at the time. The overhead was massive due to massive stalls
> and excessive reclaim -- hours to complete some high-allocation stress
> tests even if the success rate was high.

There were a couple of high order page reclaim improvements implemented
at that time that were later abandoned. I think higher order pages were
more available than now. SLUB was regularly able to get higher order pages.