From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262041AbVGZTPt (ORCPT ); Tue, 26 Jul 2005 15:15:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261982AbVGZTPq (ORCPT ); Tue, 26 Jul 2005 15:15:46 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:55703 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261962AbVGZTN4 (ORCPT ); Tue, 26 Jul 2005 15:13:56 -0400 Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 12:12:50 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: pbadari@us.ibm.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org Subject: Re: Memory pressure handling with iSCSI Message-Id: <20050726121250.0ba7d744.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <20050726114824.136d3dad.akpm@osdl.org> References: <1122399331.6433.29.camel@dyn9047017102.beaverton.ibm.com> <20050726111110.6b9db241.akpm@osdl.org> <1122403152.6433.39.camel@dyn9047017102.beaverton.ibm.com> <20050726114824.136d3dad.akpm@osdl.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 1.0.4 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Andrew Morton wrote: > > Can you please reduce the number of filesystems, see if that reduces the > dirty levels? Also, it's conceivable that ext3 is implicated here, so it might be saner to perform initial investigation on ext2. (when kjournald writes back a page via its buffers, the page remains "dirty" as far as the VFS is concerned. Later, someone tries to do a writepage() on it and we'll discover the buffers' cleanness and the page will be cleaned without any I/O being performed. All the throttling _should_ work OK in this case. But ext2 is more straightforward.)