On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 03:17:05PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote: > Fix "system goes unresponsive under memory pressure and lots of > dirty/writeback pages" bug. > > http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/4/4/86 > > In the above thread, Andreas Mohr described that > > Invoking any command locked up for minutes (note that I'm > talking about attempted additional I/O to the _other_, > _unaffected_ main system HDD - such as loading some shell > binaries -, NOT the external SSD18M!!). > > This happens when the two conditions are both meet: > - under memory pressure > - writing heavily to a slow device > > OOM also happens in Andreas' system. The OOM trace shows that 3 > processes are stuck in wait_on_page_writeback() in the direct reclaim > path. One in do_fork() and the other two in unix_stream_sendmsg(). They > are blocked on this condition: > > (sc->order && priority < DEF_PRIORITY - 2) > > which was introduced in commit 78dc583d (vmscan: low order lumpy reclaim > also should use PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC) one year ago. That condition may be too > permissive. In Andreas' case, 512MB/1024 = 512KB. If the direct reclaim > for the order-1 fork() allocation runs into a range of 512KB > hard-to-reclaim LRU pages, it will be stalled. > > It's a severe problem in three ways. Lumpy reclaim just made the system totally unusable with frequent order 9 allocations. I nuked it long ago and replaced it with mem compaction. You may try aa.git to test how thing goes without lumpy reclaim. I recently also started to use mem compaction for order 1/2/3 allocations as there's no point not to use it for them, and to call mem compaction from kswapd to satisfy order 2 GFP_ATOMIC in replacement of blind responsiveness-destroyer lumpy. Not sure why people insists on lumpy when we've memory compaction that won't alter the working set and it's more effective. -- 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>