Re: [PATCH 8/8] vmscan: Kick flusher threads to clean pages when reclaim is encountering dirty pages

[Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:40:26PM +0800, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:34:23PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > > If you plan to keep wakeup_flusher_threads(), a simpler form may be
> > > sufficient, eg.
> > > 
> > >         laptop_mode ? 0 : (nr_dirty * 16)
> > 
> > This number is not sensitive because the writeback code may well round
> > it up to some more IO efficient value (currently 4MB). AFAIK the
> > nr_pages parameters passed by all existing flusher callers are some
> > rule-of-thumb value, and far from being an exact number.
> > 
> 
> I get that it's a rule of thumb but decided I would still pass in some value
> related to nr_dirty that was bounded in some manner.
> Currently, that bound is 4MB but maybe it should have been bound to
> MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES (which is 4MB for x86, but could be anything
> depending on the base page size).

I see your worry about much bigger page size making

        vmscan batch size > writeback batch size

and it's a legitimate worry.

Thanks,
Fengguang