Re: The VFS cache is not freed when there is not enough free memory to allocate

Aubrey
2006-12-01T10:00:53Z

On 12/1/06, Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> The pattern you are seeing here is probably due to the page allocator
> always retrying process context allocations which are <= order 3 (64K
> with 4K pages).
>
> You might be able to increase this limit a bit for your system, but it
> could easily cause problems. Especially fragmentation on nommu systems
> where the anonymous memory cannot be paged out.

Thanks for your clue. I found increasing this limit could really help
my test cases.
When MemFree < 8M, and the test case request 1M * 8 times, the
allocation can be sucessful after 81 times rebalance, :). So far I
haven't found any issue.

If I make a patch to move this parameter to be tunable in the proc
filesystem on nommu case, is it acceptable?

Thanks,
-Aubrey