Re: [PATCH] mm: evict streaming IO cache first

Linus Torvalds
2008-11-17T17:06:34Z

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Rik van Riel wrote:

> Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> > Another thing strikes me: it looks like the logic in "get_scan_ratio()" has
> > a tendency to get unbalanced - if we end up deciding that we should scan a
> > lot of anonymous pages, the scan numbers for anonymous pages will go up, and
> > we get even _more_ eager to scan those. Of course, "rotate" events will then
> > make us less likely again, but for streaming loads, you wouldn't expect to
> > see those at all.
>
> True for streaming loads - if we scan the file list and find
> mostly pages from streaming loads, we will become more eager
> to scan the file list.

The "count adding as activity" might hide that, but it does seem a big
iffy.

> > There seems to be another bug there wrt the "aging" - we age anon page
> > events and file page events independently, which sounds like it would make
> > the math totally nonsensical. We do that whole
> >
> > anon / (anon + file)
>
> That's an outdated comment. Andrew had a patch to update that
> comment, but it must have gotten lost somewhere. I'll send you
> a patch to update it.
>
> If you look at the actual calculation, you'l see that the
> scan percentages are keyed off just swappiness and the
> rotated/scanned ratios for each page category.

Ok, that makes sense. Yes, as ratios the math looks valid.

Linus