On Sun, Dec 4, 2016 at 11:05 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun 04-12-16 13:56:54, Raymond Jennings wrote:
> I have an application that is generating HUGE amounts of dirty data.
> Multiple GiB worth, and I'd like to allow it to fill at least half of my
> RAM.
Could you be more specific why and what kind of problem you are trying
to solve?
> I already have /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio pegged at 80 and the background one
> pegged at 50. RAM is 32GiB.
There is also dirty_bytes alternative which is an absolute numer.
How does this compare to setting dirty_ratio to a high percentage?
> it appears to be butting heads with clean memory. How do I tell my system
> to prefer using RAM to soak up writes instead of caching?
I am not sure I understand. Could you be more specific about what is the
actual problem? Is it possible that your dirty data is already being
flushed and that is wy you see a clean cache?
What I'm wanting is for my writing process not to get throttled, even when the dirty memory it starts creating starts hogging memory the system would rather use for cache.