Re: throttling dirtiers

Rik van Riel
2002-07-31T22:32:13Z

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:

> > The most probable reason for the stalls is the fact that
> > page_launder (like shrink_cache) will try to write out
> > the complete inactive list if it's almost full of dirty
> > pages, so the system will still be stuck in __get_request_wait
> > seconds after the first few megabytes of the paged out
> > inactive pages have been cleaned already.
>
> I doubt if it's that, although it might be.
>
> It happens just during a kernel build, 768M of RAM. And/or
> during big CVS operations. Possibly it's due to ext3 checkpointing.

Indeed, my scenario above is unlikely to be the reason with
these workloads.

However, I have noticed the problem with fillmem, or just
when the system has the sudden urge to swapout a large
process ;)

regards,

Rik
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