The existing way of deciding if watermarks have been met looks broken to me. There are two pools of pages: One is the pages available from the buddy lists and another the pages in the per cpu lists. zone_watermark_ok() only checks those in the buddy lists (NR_FREE_PAGES) is not updated when we get a page from the per cpu lists). And we do check zone_watermark_ok() before even attempting to allocate pages that may be available from the per cpu lists? So the allocator may pass on a zone and/or go into reclaim despite of the availability of pages on per cpu lists. The more pages one puts into the per cpu lists the higher the chance of an OOM. ... Ok that is not true since we flush the per cpu pages and get them back into the buddy lists before that happens. -- 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>