On 09/20/2012 10:04 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
This is almost entirely based on Rik's previous patches and discussions with him about how this might be implemented. Order > 0 compaction stops when enough free pages of the correct page order have been coalesced. When doing subsequent higher order allocations, it is possible for compaction to be invoked many times. However, the compaction code always starts out looking for things to compact at the start of the zone, and for free pages to compact things to at the end of the zone. This can cause quadratic behaviour, with isolate_freepages starting at the end of the zone each time, even though previous invocations of the compaction code already filled up all free memory on that end of the zone. This can cause isolate_freepages to take enormous amounts of CPU with certain workloads on larger memory systems. This patch caches where the migration and free scanner should start from on subsequent compaction invocations using the pageblock-skip information. When compaction starts it begins from the cached restart points and will update the cached restart points until a page is isolated or a pageblock is skipped that would have been scanned by synchronous compaction. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
Together with patch 5/6, this has the effect of skipping compaction in a zone if the free and isolate markers have met, and it has been less than 5 seconds since the "skip" information was reset. Compaction on zones where we cycle through more slowly can continue, even when this particular zone is experiencing problems, so I guess this is desired behaviour... Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> -- 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/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>