On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 05:18:19PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote: > Andrew, > > I'm getting around to pick up the readahead works again :-) > > This first series is mainly to add some debug facilities, to support the long > missed backwards prefetching capability, and some old patches that somehow get > delayed (shame me). > > The next step would be to better handle the readahead thrashing situations. > That would require rewriting part of the algorithms, this is why I'd like to > keep the backwards prefetching simple and stupid for now. > > When (almost) free of readahead thrashing, we'll be in a good position to lift > the default readahead size. Which I suspect would be the single most efficient > way to improve performance for the large volumes of casually maintained Linux > file servers. Btw, if you work actively in that area I have a todo list item I was planning to look into sooner or later: instead of embedding the ra state into the struct file allocate it dynamically. That way files that either don't use the pagecache, or aren't read from won't need have to pay the price for increasing struct file size, and if we have to we could enlarge it more easily. Besides removing f_version in the common struct file and also allocting f_owner separately that seem to be the easiest ways to get struct file size down. -- 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>