On Tue, 10 Nov 2015, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > I know this patch is in -mm and hasn't been merged by Linus yet, but I'm > > wondering why the multiple /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches is helping? Would it > > simply suffice to put a sleep in there instead or is drop_caches actually > > doing something useful a second time around? > > Initially I just retried setting nr_hugepages up to 10 times, which > wasn't sufficient. Then I added the drop_caches, and after that > setting nr_hugepages tended to worked first time so I reduced the retry > count. It might not be necessary to retry at all. > Ok, thanks. I was just trying to make sure that the additional drop_caches wasn't actually required for the test, in which case we would have to fix drop_caches :)