On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 01:57:26PM -0700, Michael Rubin wrote: > To help developers and applications gain visibility into writeback > behaviour adding four read only sysctl files into /proc/sys/vm. > These files allow user apps to understand writeback behaviour over time > and learn how it is impacting their performance. > > # cat /proc/sys/vm/pages_dirtied > 3747 > # cat /proc/sys/vm/pages_entered_writeback > 3618 As Rik said, /proc/sys is not a suitable place. Frankly speaking I've worked on writeback for years and never felt the need to add these counters. What I often do is: $ vmmon -d 1 nr_writeback nr_dirty nr_unstable nr_writeback nr_dirty nr_unstable 68738 0 39568 66051 0 42255 63406 0 44900 60643 0 47663 57954 0 50352 55264 0 53042 52592 0 55715 49922 0 58385 That is what I get when copying /dev/zero to NFS. You can find vmmon.c in Andrew Morton's ext3-tools package. Also attached for your convenience. I'm very interested in Google's use case for this patch, and why the simple /proc/vmstat based vmmon tool is not enough. 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>