On 02/22/2010 02:49 PM, Johannes Weiner wrote:
The VM currently assumes that an inactive, mapped and referenced file page is in use and promotes it to the active list. However, every mapped file page starts out like this and thus a problem arises when workloads create a stream of such pages that are used only for a short time. By flooding the active list with those pages, the VM quickly gets into trouble finding eligible reclaim canditates. The result is long allocation latencies and eviction of the wrong pages. This patch reuses the PG_referenced page flag (used for unmapped file pages) to implement a usage detection that scales with the speed of LRU list cycling (i.e. memory pressure). If the scanner encounters those pages, the flag is set and the page cycled again on the inactive list. Only if it returns with another page table reference it is activated. Otherwise it is reclaimed as 'not recently used cache'. This effectively changes the minimum lifetime of a used-once mapped file page from a full memory cycle to an inactive list cycle, which allows it to occur in linear streams without affecting the stable working set of the system. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner<hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>