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From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>,
	Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@openvz.org>,
	linux-mm@kvack.org, Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] mm: take pagevecs off reclaim stack
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:59:17 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20111229195917.13f15974.akpm@linux-foundation.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LSU.2.00.1112291753350.3614@eggly.anvils>

On Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:55:14 -0800 (PST) Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> wrote:

> > However, at that time, I think this patch behave
> > better than old. If we release and retake zone lock per 14 pages,
> > other tasks can easily steal a part of lumpy reclaimed pages. and then
> > long latency wrongness will be happen when system is under large page
> > memory allocation pressure. That's the reason why I posted very similar patch
> > a long time ago.
> 
> Aha, and another good point.  Thank you.

I hope you understand it better than I :(

Long lock hold times and long irq-off times are demonstrable problems
which have hurt people in the past.  Whereas the someone-stole-my-page
issue is theoretical, undemonstrated and unquantified.  And for
some people, lengthy worst-case latency is a serious problem, doesn't
matter whether the system is under memory pressure or not - that simply
determines when the worst-case hits.

This is not all some handwavy theoretical thing either.  If we've gone
and introduced serious latency issues, people *will* hit them and treat
it as a regression.


Now, a way out here is to remove lumpy reclaim (please).  And make the
problem not come back by promising to never call putback_lru_pages(lots
of pages) (how do we do this?).

So I think the best way ahead here is to distribute this patch in the
same release in which we remove lumpy reclaim (pokes Mel).

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  reply	other threads:[~2011-12-30  3:55 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2011-12-29  4:32 [PATCH 0/3] mm: three minor vmscan improvements Hugh Dickins
2011-12-29  4:35 ` [PATCH 1/3] mm: test PageSwapBacked in lumpy reclaim Hugh Dickins
2011-12-29  5:06   ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2012-01-04  1:23   ` Minchan Kim
2012-01-05  6:03   ` KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
2011-12-29  4:36 ` [PATCH 2/3] mm: cond_resched in scan_mapping_unevictable_pages Hugh Dickins
2011-12-29  5:14   ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2011-12-29  5:48     ` Hugh Dickins
2011-12-29 22:46       ` Hugh Dickins
2011-12-29  4:39 ` [PATCH 3/3] mm: take pagevecs off reclaim stack Hugh Dickins
2011-12-29  5:42   ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2011-12-29 11:18   ` Konstantin Khlebnikov
2011-12-29 22:20     ` Hugh Dickins
2011-12-29 22:55   ` Andrew Morton
2011-12-29 23:27     ` Hugh Dickins
2011-12-30  0:24       ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2011-12-30  1:55         ` Hugh Dickins
2011-12-30  3:59           ` Andrew Morton [this message]
2011-12-30 15:51             ` Mel Gorman
2012-01-01  7:18             ` Hugh Dickins
2012-01-03 23:12               ` Andrew Morton
2012-01-03 23:17                 ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2012-01-03 23:29                   ` Andrew Morton
2012-01-04  0:03                     ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2012-01-04  3:22                 ` Hugh Dickins
2012-01-04 20:20                   ` Andrew Morton

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