On 03/02/2012 01:14 AM, Fengguang Wu wrote:
When starting a memory hog task, a desktop box w/o swap is found to go unresponsive for a long time. It's solely caused by lots of congestion waits in throttle_vm_writeout(): gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073384: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1 gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073386: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000 gtali-4237 553.080377: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1 gtali-4237 553.080378: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000 Xorg-3483 553.103375: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1 Xorg-3483 553.103377: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000 The root cause is, the dirty threshold is knocked down a lot by the memory hog task. Fixed by using global_dirty_limit which decreases gradually on such events and can guarantee we stay above (the also decreasing) nr_dirty in the progress of following down to the new dirty threshold. Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu<fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx>
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