Hi Mel, > Second, using systemtap, I was able to see that file-backed dirty > pages have a tendency to be near the end of the LRU even though they > are a small percentage of the overall pages in the LRU. I'm hoping > to figure out why this is as it would make avoiding writeback a lot > less controversial. Your intuitions are correct -- the current background writeback logic fails to write elder inodes first. Under heavy loads the background writeback job may run for ever, totally ignoring the time order of inode->dirtied_when. This is probably why you see lots of dirty pages near the end of LRU. Here is an old patch for fixing this. Sorry for being late. I'll pick up and refresh the patch series ASAP. (I made a mistake last year to post too many patches at one time. I'll break them up into more manageable pieces.) [PATCH 31/45] writeback: sync old inodes first in background writeback <https://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-fsdevel/2009/10/7/6476313> Thanks, Fengguang -- 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>