On 09/20/2012 10:04 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
Compactions migrate scanner acquires the zone->lru_lock when scanning a range of pages looking for LRU pages to acquire. It does this even if there are no LRU pages in the range. If multiple processes are compacting then this can cause severe locking contention. To make matters worse commit b2eef8c0 (mm: compaction: minimise the time IRQs are disabled while isolating pages for migration) releases the lru_lock every SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages that are scanned. This patch makes two changes to how the migrate scanner acquires the LRU lock. First, it only releases the LRU lock every SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages if the lock is contended. This reduces the number of times it unnecessarily disables and re-enables IRQs. The second is that it defers acquiring the LRU lock for as long as possible. If there are no LRU pages or the only LRU pages are transhuge then the LRU lock will not be acquired at all which reduces contention on zone->lru_lock. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
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