Re: Kernel 2.6.9 Multiple Page Allocation Failures

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Lukas Hejtmanek <xhejtman@hell.sks3.muni.cz> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 02:56:10PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > It's quite possible that XFS is performing rather too many GFP_ATOMIC
> > allocations and is depleting the page reserves.  Although increasing
> > /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes should help there.
> 
> Btw, how the min_free_kbytes works?

The page reclaim code and the page allocator will aim to keep that amount
of memory free for emergency, IRQ and atomic allocations.

> I have up to 1MB TCP windows. If I'm running out of memory then kswapd should
> try to free some memory (or bdflush).

yes, there's some latency involved.  Especially on uniprocessor - if the
CPU is stuck in an interrupt handler refilling a huge network Rx ring then
waking kswapd won't do anything and you will run out of memory.

> But on GE I can receive data faster then
> disk is able to swap or flush buffers. So I should keep min_free big enough to
> give time to disk to flush/swap data?

All I can say is "experiment with it".

It might be useful to renice kswapd so that userspace processes do not
increase its latency.