On 03/17/2013 09:04 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
The number of pages kswapd can reclaim is bound by the number of pages it scans which is related to the size of the zone and the scanning priority. In many cases the priority remains low because it's reset every SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX reclaimed pages but in the event kswapd scans a large number of pages it cannot reclaim, it will raise the priority and potentially discard a large percentage of the zone as sc->nr_to_reclaim is ULONG_MAX. The user-visible effect is a reclaim "spike" where a large percentage of memory is suddenly freed. It would be bad enough if this was just unused memory but because of how anon/file pages are balanced it is possible that applications get pushed to swap unnecessarily. This patch limits the number of pages kswapd will reclaim to the high watermark. Reclaim will will overshoot due to it not being a hard limit as shrink_lruvec() will ignore the sc.nr_to_reclaim at DEF_PRIORITY but it prevents kswapd reclaiming the world at higher priorities. The number of pages it reclaims is not adjusted for high-order allocations as kswapd will reclaim excessively if it is to balance zones for high-order allocations. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
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