Re: [PATCH 8/8] vmscan: Kick flusher threads to clean pages when reclaim is encountering dirty pages

Wu Fengguang
2010-07-26T11:27:29Z

> > > @@ -933,13 +934,16 @@ keep_dirty:
> > > VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page) || PageUnevictable(page));
> > > }
> > >
> > > + /*
> > > + * If reclaim is encountering dirty pages, it may be because
> > > + * dirty pages are reaching the end of the LRU even though
> > > + * the dirty_ratio may be satisified. In this case, wake
> > > + * flusher threads to pro-actively clean some pages
> > > + */
> > > + wakeup_flusher_threads(laptop_mode ? 0 : nr_dirty + nr_dirty / 2);
> >
> > Ah it's very possible that nr_dirty==0 here! Then you are hitting the
> > number of dirty pages down to 0 whether or not pageout() is called.
> >
>
> True, this has been fixed to only wakeup flusher threads when this is
> the file LRU, dirty pages have been encountered and the caller has
> sc->may_writepage.

OK.

> > Another minor issue is, the passed (nr_dirty + nr_dirty / 2) is
> > normally a small number, much smaller than MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES.
> > The flusher will sync at least MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES pages, this is good
> > for efficiency.
> > And it seems good to let the flusher write much more
> > than nr_dirty pages to safeguard a reasonable large
> > vmscan-head-to-first-dirty-LRU-page margin. So it would be enough to
> > update the comments.
> >
>
> Ok, the reasoning had been to flush a number of pages that was related
> to the scanning rate but if that is inefficient for the flusher, I'll
> use MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES.

It would be better to pass something like (nr_dirty * N).
MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES may be increased to 128MB in the future, which is
obviously too large as a parameter. When the batch size is increased
to 128MB, the writeback code may be improved somehow to not exceed the
nr_pages limit too much.

Thanks,
Fengguang