On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 02:50:31PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote: > For workloads that cause a lot of fragmentation - yes. Simplistically with 1, > the trace event mm_page_alloc_extfrag will trigger more frequently and > it's more likely to be severe. The problem is that if it's not "* 2", > there is a very low probability that there will pages free in a suitable > pageblock and "mixing" occurs. It can take a very long time for > allocation success rates to go down but it happens eventually. Ok I see. Thanks for the clarification. So I think the other two spots I quoted in prev email are the only two bits we can adjust if booting madvise doesn't fix it completely (in addition to the *8 removal in kswapd, but that only affects ~4G systems, that are however very common this is an old bug that just got better exposed with an higher min_free_kbytes default). -- 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 internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>