Re: Avoid allocating during interleave from almost full nodes

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 17:26:05 -0800
Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> wrote:

> Andrew wrote:
> > But in this application which you are proposing, any correlation with
> > elapsed walltime is very slight.  It's just the wrong baseline to use. 
> > What is the *sense* in it?
> 
> Ah - but time is cheap as dirt, and scales like the common cold virus.
> That makes it sinfully attractive for secondary affect placement cache
> hints like this.
> 
> What else would you suggest?
> 
> Same question applies, I suppose, to my zonelist caching patch that is
> sitting in your *-mm patch stack, where you also had doubts about using
> wall clock time to decay the fullnode hints.

Depends what it's doing.  "number of pages allocated" would be a good
"clock" to use in the VM.  Or pages scanned.  Or per-cpu-pages reloads. 
Something which adjusts to what's going on.