On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 03:31:24PM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote: > It is preferable that no dirty pages are dispatched for cleaning from > the page reclaim path. At normal priorities, this patch prevents kswapd > writing pages. > > However, page reclaim does have a requirement that pages be freed > in a particular zone. If it is failing to make sufficient progress > (reclaiming < SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX at any priority priority), the priority > is raised to scan more pages. A priority of DEF_PRIORITY - 3 is > considered to tbe the point where kswapd is getting into trouble > reclaiming pages. If this priority is reached, kswapd will dispatch > pages for writing. > > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx> Seems reasonable, but btrfs still will ignore this writeback from kswapd, and it doesn't fall over. Given that data point, I'd like to see the results when you stop kswapd from doing writeback altogether as well. Can you try removing it altogether and seeing what that does to your test results? i.e if (page_is_file_cache(page)) { inc_zone_page_state(page, NR_VMSCAN_WRITE_SKIP); goto keep_locked; } Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. 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>