Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8

Ingo Molnar
2007-08-04T07:08:08Z

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:

> There are positive reports in the never-ending "my system crawls like
> an XT when copying large files" bugzilla entry:
>
> http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372

i forgot this entry:

" We recently upgraded our office to gigabit Ethernet and got some big
AMD64 / 3ware boxes for file and vmware servers... only to find them
almost useless under any kind of real load. I've built some patched
2.6.21.6 kernels (using the bdi throttling patch you mentioned) to
see if our various Debian Etch boxes run better. So far my testing
shows a *great* improvement over the stock Debian 2.6.18 kernel on
our configurations. "

and bdi has been in -mm in the past i think, so we also know (to a
certain degree) that it does not hurt those workloads that are fine
either.

[ my personal interest in this is the following regression: every time i
start a large kernel build with DEBUG_INFO on a quad-core 4GB RAM box,
i get up to 30 seconds complete pauses in Vim (and most other tasks),
during plain editing of the source code. (which happens when Vim tries
to write() to its swap/undo-file.) ]

Ingo