Re: [PATCH/RFC 0/4] VM: Manual and Automatic page cache reclaim

[Martin Hicks <mort@sgi.com>]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 07:56:07AM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > Is it not possible to change the page allocator's zone fallback mechanism
> > so that once the local node's zones' pages are all allocated, we don't
> > simply advance onto the next node?  Instead, could we not perform a bit of
> > reclaim on this node's zones first?  Only advance onto the next nodes if
> > things aren't working out?
> 
> IMHO that's the best idea.  The patches posted add new
> mechanisms to the VM and have the potential to disturb
> LRU ordering quite a bit - which could make the VM
> worse under load.

I'd like to see Nick's patch.  Through the mempolicy the patch does take
the approach of freeing memory on the preferred node before going
offnode.  I agree that the patch disturbs LRU ordering.  The reason that
I have to destroy LRU ordering is so that I don't have to scan through
the same Dirty/Locked/whatever pages on the tail of the LRU list during
each call to reclaim_clean_pages().

mh

--
Martin Hicks   ||   Silicon Graphics Inc.   ||   mort@sgi.com
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