Re: [2.4] heavy-load under swap space shortage

Andrea Arcangeli
2004-03-15T14:49:38Z

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 01:37:04AM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> This case I think is well worth the unfairness it causes, because it
> means your zone's pages can be freed quickly and without freeing pages
> from other zones.

freeing pages from other zones is perfectly fine, the classzone design
gets it right, you have to free memory from the other zones too or you
have no way to work on a 1G machine. you call the thing "unfair" when it
has nothing to do with fariness, your unfariness is the slowdown I
pointed out, it's all about being able to maintain a more reliable cache
information from the point of view of the pagecache users (the pagecache
users cares at the _classzone_, they can't care about the zones
themself), it has nothing to do with fairness.