Re: pressuring dirty pages (2.3.99-pre6)

Stephen C. Tweedie
2000-04-24T21:27:02Z

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 04:54:38PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> I've been trying to fix the VM balance for a week or so now,
> and things are mostly fixed except for one situation.
>
> If there is a *heavy* write going on and the data is in the
> page cache only .. ie. no buffer heads available, then the
> page cache will grow almost without bounds and kswapd and
> the rest of the system will basically spin in shrink_mmap()...

shrink_mmap is the problem then -- it should be giving up
sooner and letting try_to_swap_out() deal with the pages. mmap()ed
dirty pages can only be freed through swapper activity, not via
shrink_mmap().

--Stephen