Re: [PATCH 0/4] linux-2.6-block: deactivating pagecache for benchmarks

Badari Pulavarty
2005-12-02T19:19:14Z

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 20:34 -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 05:25:20PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Dirk Henning Gerdes <mail@dirk-gerdes.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > For doing benchmarks on the I/O-Schedulers, I thought it would be very
> > > useful to disable the pagecache.
> >
> > That's an FAQ. Something like this?
> >
> >
> > From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
> >
> > Add /proc/sys/vm/drop-pagecache. When written to, this will cause the kernel
> > to discard as much pagecache and reclaimable slab objects as it can.
> >
> > It won't drop dirty data, so the user should run `sync' first.
> >
> > Caveats:
> >
> > a) Holds inode_lock for exorbitant amounts of time.
> >
> > b) Needs to be taught about NUMA nodes: propagate these all the way through
> > so the discarding can be controlled on a per-node basis.
> >
> > c) The pagecache shrinking and slab shrinking should probably have separate
> > controls.
> >
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
>
> ACK, I've wanted something like this for a while.
>
> I really think it should be a config option, though, to discourage
> people from building with it :)

Why ? Since its controlled through /proc, if some one "echo" stuff into
it, they might get crappy performance (like other /proc tunables).
Isn't it expected ?

Thanks,
Badari