On 10/12/2012 03:57 PM, Mel Gorman wrote: > mm: vmscan: scale number of pages reclaimed by reclaim/compaction only in direct reclaim > > Jiri Slaby reported the following: > > (It's an effective revert of "mm: vmscan: scale number of pages > reclaimed by reclaim/compaction based on failures".) > Given kswapd had hours of runtime in ps/top output yesterday in the > morning and after the revert it's now 2 minutes in sum for the last 24h, > I would say, it's gone. > > The intention of the patch in question was to compensate for the loss of > lumpy reclaim. Part of the reason lumpy reclaim worked is because it > aggressively reclaimed pages and this patch was meant to be a > sane compromise. > > When compaction fails, it gets deferred and both compaction and > reclaim/compaction is deferred avoid excessive reclaim. However, since > commit c6543459 (mm: remove __GFP_NO_KSWAPD), kswapd is woken up each time > and continues reclaiming which was not taken into account when the patch > was developed. > > As it is not taking deferred compaction into account in this path it scans > aggressively before falling out and making the compaction_deferred check in > compaction_ready. This patch avoids kswapd scaling pages for reclaim and > leaves the aggressive reclaim to the process attempting the THP > allocation. > > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx> > --- > mm/vmscan.c | 10 ++++++++-- > 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) > > diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c > index 2624edc..2b7edfa 100644 > --- a/mm/vmscan.c > +++ b/mm/vmscan.c > @@ -1763,14 +1763,20 @@ static bool in_reclaim_compaction(struct scan_control *sc) > #ifdef CONFIG_COMPACTION > /* > * If compaction is deferred for sc->order then scale the number of pages > - * reclaimed based on the number of consecutive allocation failures > + * reclaimed based on the number of consecutive allocation failures. This > + * scaling only happens for direct reclaim as it is about to attempt > + * compaction. If compaction fails, future allocations will be deferred > + * and reclaim avoided. On the other hand, kswapd does not take compaction > + * deferral into account so if it scaled, it could scan excessively even > + * though allocations are temporarily not being attempted. > */ > static unsigned long scale_for_compaction(unsigned long pages_for_compaction, > struct lruvec *lruvec, struct scan_control *sc) > { > struct zone *zone = lruvec_zone(lruvec); > > - if (zone->compact_order_failed <= sc->order) > + if (zone->compact_order_failed <= sc->order && > + !current_is_kswapd()) > pages_for_compaction <<= zone->compact_defer_shift; > return pages_for_compaction; > } Yes, applying this instead of the revert fixes the issue as well. thanks, -- js suse labs -- 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>