Re: [PATCH 3/3] mm: slub: Default slub_max_order to 0

Andrea Arcangeli
2011-05-12T17:51:22Z

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 08:11:05PM +0300, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> If it's this:
>
> http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=kernel.git;a=blob_plain;f=config-x86_64-generic;hb=HEAD
>
> I'd love to see what happens if you disable
>
> CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE=y
>
> because that's going to reduce high order allocations as well, no?

Well THP forces COMPACTION=y so lumpy won't risk to be activated. I
got once a complaint asking not to make THP force COMPACTION=y (there
is no real dependency here, THP will just call alloc_pages with
__GFP_NO_KSWAPD and order 9, or 10 on x86-nopae), but I preferred to
keep it forced exactly to avoid issues like these when THP is on. If
even order 3 is causing troubles (which doesn't immediately make lumpy
activated, it only activates when priority is < DEF_PRIORITY-2, so
after 2 loops failing to reclaim nr_to_reclaim pages), imagine what
was happening at order 9 every time firefox, gcc and mutt allocated
memory ;).