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    SubjectRe: [PATCH 8/8] vmscan: Kick flusher threads to clean pages when reclaim is encountering dirty pages
    On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 09:11:30PM +0800, Mel Gorman wrote:
    > There are a number of cases where pages get cleaned but two of concern
    > to this patch are;
    > o When dirtying pages, processes may be throttled to clean pages if
    > dirty_ratio is not met.
    > o Pages belonging to inodes dirtied longer than
    > dirty_writeback_centisecs get cleaned.
    >
    > The problem for reclaim is that dirty pages can reach the end of the LRU
    > if pages are being dirtied slowly so that neither the throttling cleans
    > them or a flusher thread waking periodically.
    >
    > Background flush is already cleaning old or expired inodes first but the
    > expire time is too far in the future at the time of page reclaim. To mitigate
    > future problems, this patch wakes flusher threads to clean 1.5 times the
    > number of dirty pages encountered by reclaimers. The reasoning is that pages
    > were being dirtied at a roughly constant rate recently so if N dirty pages
    > were encountered in this scan block, we are likely to see roughly N dirty
    > pages again soon so try keep the flusher threads ahead of reclaim.
    >
    > This is unfortunately very hand-wavy but there is not really a good way of
    > quantifying how bad it is when reclaim encounters dirty pages other than
    > "down with that sort of thing". Similarly, there is not an obvious way of
    > figuring how what percentage of dirty pages are old in terms of LRU-age and
    > should be cleaned. Ideally, the background flushers would only be cleaning
    > pages belonging to the zone being scanned but it's not clear if this would
    > be of benefit (less IO) or not (potentially less efficient IO if an inode
    > is scattered across multiple zones).
    >
    > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
    > ---
    > mm/vmscan.c | 18 +++++++++++-------
    > 1 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
    >
    > diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
    > index bc50937..5763719 100644
    > --- a/mm/vmscan.c
    > +++ b/mm/vmscan.c
    > @@ -806,6 +806,8 @@ restart_dirty:
    > }
    >
    > if (PageDirty(page)) {
    > + nr_dirty++;
    > +
    > /*
    > * If the caller cannot writeback pages, dirty pages
    > * are put on a separate list for cleaning by either
    > @@ -814,7 +816,6 @@ restart_dirty:
    > if (!reclaim_can_writeback(sc, page)) {
    > list_add(&page->lru, &dirty_pages);
    > unlock_page(page);
    > - nr_dirty++;
    > goto keep_dirty;
    > }
    >
    > @@ -933,13 +934,16 @@ keep_dirty:
    > VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page) || PageUnevictable(page));
    > }
    >
    > + /*
    > + * If reclaim is encountering dirty pages, it may be because
    > + * dirty pages are reaching the end of the LRU even though
    > + * the dirty_ratio may be satisified. In this case, wake
    > + * flusher threads to pro-actively clean some pages
    > + */
    > + wakeup_flusher_threads(laptop_mode ? 0 : nr_dirty + nr_dirty / 2);

    Ah it's very possible that nr_dirty==0 here! Then you are hitting the
    number of dirty pages down to 0 whether or not pageout() is called.

    Another minor issue is, the passed (nr_dirty + nr_dirty / 2) is
    normally a small number, much smaller than MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES.
    The flusher will sync at least MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES pages, this is good
    for efficiency. And it seems good to let the flusher write much more
    than nr_dirty pages to safeguard a reasonable large
    vmscan-head-to-first-dirty-LRU-page margin. So it would be enough to
    update the comments.

    Thanks,
    Fengguang

    > if (dirty_isolated < MAX_SWAP_CLEAN_WAIT && !list_empty(&dirty_pages)) {
    > - /*
    > - * Wakeup a flusher thread to clean at least as many dirty
    > - * pages as encountered by direct reclaim. Wait on congestion
    > - * to throttle processes cleaning dirty pages
    > - */
    > - wakeup_flusher_threads(nr_dirty);
    > + /* Throttle direct reclaimers cleaning pages */
    > congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
    >
    > /*
    > --
    > 1.7.1


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