Re: Results: pre6 vs pre6+zlatko's_patch vs pre5 vs arcavm13

Linus Torvalds
1999-01-10T05:37:08Z

On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, Steve Bergman wrote:
>
> I ran the "image test" (loading 116 jpg images simultaneously) on the latest
> patches and got these results in 128MB (I end up with ~ 160MB in swap):
>
> pre6+zlatko's_patch 2:35
> pre6 2:27
> pre5 1:58
> arcavm13 9:13

Can you run pre6+zlatko with just the mm/page_alloc.c one-liner reverted
to pre5? That is, take pre6+zlatko, and just change

try_to_free_pages(gfp_mask, freepages.high - nr_free_pages);

back to

try_to_free_pages(gfp_mask, SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX);

That particular one-liner was almost certainly a mistake, it was done on
the mistaken assumption that the clustering problem was due to
insufficient write-time clustering - while zlatko found that it was
actually due to fragmentation in the swap area. With zlatkos patch, the
original SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX is probably better and almost certainly results
in smoother behaviour due to less extreme free_pages..

Linus