Re: [PATCH] mm: swsusp shrink_all_memory tweaks

["Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>]

Hi,

On Friday 24 March 2006 17:14, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Friday 24 March 2006 16:30, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > On Saturday 25 March 2006 02:16, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > > On Friday 24 March 2006 08:07, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > > > On Tuesday 21 March 2006 05:46, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > > > > swsusp_shrink_memory() is still wrong, because it will always fail for
> > > > > image_size = 0.  My bad, sorry.
> > > > >
> > > > > The appended patch (on top of yours) should fix that (hope I did it
> > > > > right this time).
> > > >
> > > > Well I discovered that if all the necessary memory is freed in one call
> > > > to shrink_all_memory we don't get the nice updating printout from
> > > >  swsusp_shrink_memory telling us we're making progress. So instead of
> > > >  modifying the function to call shrink_all_memory with the full amount
> > > > (and since we've botched swsusp_shrink_memory a few times between us), we
> > > > should limit it to a max of SHRINK_BITEs instead.
> > > >
> > > >  This patch is fine standalone.
> > > >
> > > >  Rafael, Pavel what do you think of this one?
> > >
> > > In principle it looks good to me, but when I tested the previous one I
> > > noticed shrink_all_memory() tended to return 0 prematurely (ie. when it was
> > > possible to free some more pages).  It only happened if more than 50% of
> > > memory was occupied by application data.
> > >
> > > Unfortunately I couldn't find the reason.
> > 
> > Perhaps it was just trying to free up too much in one go. There are a number 
> > of steps a mapped page needs to go through before being finally swapped and 
> > there are a limited number of iterations over it. Limiting it to SHRINK_BITEs 
> > at a time will probably improve that.
> 
> OK [I'll be testing it for the next couple of days.]

OK, I have the following observations:

1) The patch generally causes more memory to be freed during suspend than
the unpatched code (good).
2) However, if more than 50% of RAM is used by application data, it causes
the swap prefetch to trigger during resume (that's an impression; anyway
the system swaps in a lot at that time), which takes some time (generally
it makes resume 5-10s longer on my box).
3) The problem with returning zero prematurely has not been entirely
eliminated.  It's happened for me only once, though.

Greetings,
Rafael