Re: Large slab cache in 2.6.1

Mike Fedyk
2004-02-23T02:28:36Z

Ed Tomlinson wrote:

> On February 21, 2004 10:28 pm, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Maybe gradual page-cache pressure could shirnk the slab?
>>
>>
>>What happened to the experiment of having slab pages on the (in)active
>>lists and letting them be free'd that way? Didn't somebody already do
>>that? Ed Tomlinson and Craig Kulesa?
>
>
> You have a good memory.
>
> We dropped this experiment since there was a lot of latency between the time a
> slab page became freeable and when it was actually freed. The current
> call back scheme was designed to balance slab preasure and vmscaning.

Does it really matter if there is a lot of latency? How does this
affect real-world results? IOW, if it's not at the end of the LRU, then
there's probably something better to free instead...