On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 10:10:46PM +0800, Mel Gorman wrote: > On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 09:48:45PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote: > > > + /* > > > + * If reclaim is encountering dirty pages, it may be because > > > + * dirty pages are reaching the end of the LRU even though the > > > + * dirty_ratio may be satisified. In this case, wake flusher > > > + * threads to pro-actively clean up to a maximum of > > > + * 4 * SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX amount of data (usually 1/2MB) unless > > > + * !may_writepage indicates that this is a direct reclaimer in > > > + * laptop mode avoiding disk spin-ups > > > + */ > > > + if (file && nr_dirty_seen && sc->may_writepage) > > > + wakeup_flusher_threads(nr_writeback_pages(nr_dirty)); > > > > wakeup_flusher_threads() works, but seems not the pertinent one. > > > > - locally, it needs some luck to clean the pages that direct reclaim is waiting on > > There is a certain amount of luck involved but it's depending on there being a > correlation between old inodes and old pages on the LRU list. As long as that > correlation is accurate, some relevant pages will get cleaned. Testing on > previously released versions of this patch did show that the percentage of > dirty pages encountered during reclaim were reduced as a result of this patch. Yup. > > - globally, it cleans up some dirty pages, however some heavy dirtier > > may quickly create new ones.. > > > > So how about taking the approaches in these patches? > > > > - "[PATCH 4/4] vmscan: transfer async file writeback to the flusher" > > - "[PATCH 15/17] mm: lower soft dirty limits on memory pressure" > > > > There is a lot going on in those patches. It's going to take me a while to > figure them out and formulate an opinion. OK. I also need some time off for doing other works :) > > In particular the first patch should work very nicely with memcg, as > > all pages of an inode typically belong to the same memcg. So doing > > write-around helps clean lots of dirty pages in the target LRU list in > > one shot. > > > > It might but as there is also a correlation between old dirty inodes and > the location of dirty pages, it is tricky to predict if it is better and > if so, by how much. It at least guarantees to clean the one page pageout() is running into :) Others will depend on the locality/sequentiality of the workload. But as the write-around pages are in the same LRU lists, the vmscan code will hit them sooner or later. 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>