On Fri, May 06, 2011 at 08:42:24AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote: > > 1. High-order allocations? You machine is using i915 and RPC, something > neither of my test machine uses. i915 is potentially a source for > high-order allocations. I'm attaching a perl script. Please run it as > ./watch-highorder.pl --output /tmp/highorders.txt > while you are running tar. When kswapd is running for about 30 > seconds, interrupt it with ctrl+c twice in quick succession and > post /tmp/highorders.txt > Colin send me this information for his test case at least and I see 11932 instances order=1 normal gfp_flags=GFP_NOWARN|GFP_NORETRY|GFP_COMP|GFP_NOMEMALLOC => alloc_pages_current+0xa5/0x110 <ffffffff81149ef5> => new_slab+0x1f5/0x290 <ffffffff81153645> => __slab_alloc+0x262/0x390 <ffffffff81155192> => kmem_cache_alloc+0x115/0x120 <ffffffff81155ab5> => mempool_alloc_slab+0x15/0x20 <ffffffff8110e705> => mempool_alloc+0x59/0x140 <ffffffff8110ea49> => bio_alloc_bioset+0x3e/0xf0 <ffffffff811976ae> => bio_alloc+0x15/0x30 <ffffffff81197805> Colin and James: Did you happen to switch from SLAB to SLUB between 2.6.37 and 2.6.38? My own tests were against SLAB which might be why I didn't see the problem. Am restarting the tests with SLUB. -- Mel Gorman SUSE Labs -- 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>