Re: [RFC PATCH] mm: don't reclaim inodes with many attached pages

[Andrew Morton]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 16:43:29 +0000 Roman Gushchin <guro@xxxxxx> wrote:

> Spock reported that the commit 172b06c32b94 ("mm: slowly shrink slabs
> with a relatively small number of objects") leads to a regression on
> his setup: periodically the majority of the pagecache is evicted
> without an obvious reason, while before the change the amount of free
> memory was balancing around the watermark.
> 
> The reason behind is that the mentioned above change created some
> minimal background pressure on the inode cache. The problem is that
> if an inode is considered to be reclaimed, all belonging pagecache
> page are stripped, no matter how many of them are there. So, if a huge
> multi-gigabyte file is cached in the memory, and the goal is to
> reclaim only few slab objects (unused inodes), we still can eventually
> evict all gigabytes of the pagecache at once.
> 
> The workload described by Spock has few large non-mapped files in the
> pagecache, so it's especially noticeable.
> 
> To solve the problem let's postpone the reclaim of inodes, which have
> more than 1 attached page. Let's wait until the pagecache pages will
> be evicted naturally by scanning the corresponding LRU lists, and only
> then reclaim the inode structure.

Is this regression serious enough to warrant fixing 4.19.1?