Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 23 May 2001 12:39:31 -0300 (BRST) | From | Rik van Riel <> | Subject | Re: write drop behind effect on active scanning |
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On Wed, 23 May 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> I just noticed a "bad" effect of write drop behind yesterday during some > tests. > > The problem is that we deactivate written pages, thus making the inactive > list become pretty big (full of unfreeable pages) under write intensive IO > workloads. > > So what happens is that we don't do _any_ aging on the active list, and in > the meantime the inactive list (which should have "easily" freeable > pages) is full of locked pages. > > I'm going to fix this one by replacing "deactivate_page(page)" to > "ClearPageReferenced(page)" in generic_file_write(). This way the written > pages are aged faster but we avoid the bad effect just described. > > Any comments on the fix ?
1) I agree with it, drop-behind should make the pages we write very likely for eviction, but we don't want that to stop the eviction of other not-used pages ...
2) OTOH, if writeout of dirty pages is a problem for the system, I guess we will want to fix that problem somehow ;) (but that's another issue)
regards,
Rik -- Linux MM bugzilla: http://linux-mm.org/bugzilla.shtml
Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...
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