Hi, On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 03:00:50PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote: > Many applications (this one and below) are stuck in > wait_on_page_writeback(). I guess this is why "heavy write to > irrelevant partition stalls the whole system". They are stuck on page > allocation. Your 512MB system memory is a bit tight, so reclaim > pressure is a bit high, which triggers the wait-on-writeback logic. "Your 512MB system memory is a bit tight". Heh, try to survive making such a statement 15 years ago ;) (but you likely meant this in the context of inducing a whopping 300MB write) Thank you for your reply, I'll test the patch ASAP (with large writes and Firefox sync mixed in), maybe this will improve things already. Andreas Mohr -- 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>