Re: Change in default vm_dirty_ratio

Linus Torvalds
2007-06-19T19:06:17Z

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, John Stoffel wrote:
>
> Shouldn't the vm_dirty_ratio be based on the speed of the device, and
> not the size of memory?

Yes. It should depend on:
- speed of the device(s) in question
- seekiness of the workload
- wishes of the user as per the latency of other operations.

However, nobody has ever found the required algorithm.

So "at most 10% of memory dirty" is a simple (and fairly _good_)
heuristic. Nobody has actually ever ended up complaining about the change
from 40% -> 10%, and as far as I know this was the first report (and it's
not so much because the change was bad, but because it showed up on a
benchmark - and I don't think that actually says anythign about anything
else then the behaviour of the benchmark itself)

So are there better algorithms in theory? Probably lots of them.

Linus