On 01/28/2011 12:46 PM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
My whole point in claiming it can't affect the balancing of the lrus, is that the real lru rotation is entirely controlled by the allocator. It doesn't matter if kswapd stops at high or high+gap, for any zone at any time, as long as the allocator only allocates from one zone or the other. And if the allocator allocates from all zones in a perfectly balanced way, again kswapd will shrink in a perfectly balanced way over time regardless of high or high+gap.
My point is, the behaviour you describe would be WRONG :) The reason is that the different zones can contain data that is either heavily used or rarely used, often some mixture of the two, but sometimes the zones are out of balance in how much the data in memory gets touched. We need to reclaim and reuse the lightly used memory a little faster than the heavily used memory, to even out the memory pressure between zones. -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom policy in Canada: sign http://dissolvethecrtc.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>