Re: [PATCH -mm] vmscan: protect a fraction of file backed mapped pages from reclaim

Rik van Riel
2009-05-12T17:41:49Z

Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Tue, 12 May 2009, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
>> The patch that only allows active file pages to be deactivated
>> if the active file LRU is larger than the inactive file LRU should
>> protect the working set from being evicted due to streaming IO.
>
> Streaming I/O means access once?

Yeah, "used-once pages" would be a better criteria, since
you could go through a gigantic set of used-once pages without
doing linear IO.

I expect that some databases might do that.

> What exactly are the criteria for a page
> to be part of streaming I/O? AFAICT the definition is more dependent on
> the software running than on a certain usage pattern discernible to the
> VM. Software may after all perform multiple scans over a stream of data or
> go back to prior locations in the file.

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