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

Martin Hicks
2005-04-28T12:53:33Z

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