From 9614634fe6a138fd8ae044950700d2af8d203f97 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Christoph Lameter Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 00:24:13 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] ZVC/zone_reclaim: Leave 1% of unmapped pagecache pages for file I/O It turns out that it is advantageous to leave a small portion of unmapped file backed pages if all of a zone's pages (or almost all pages) are allocated and so the page allocator has to go off-node. This allows recently used file I/O buffers to stay on the node and reduces the times that zone reclaim is invoked if file I/O occurs when we run out of memory in a zone. The problem is that zone reclaim runs too frequently when the page cache is used for file I/O (read write and therefore unmapped pages!) alone and we have almost all pages of the zone allocated. Zone reclaim may remove 32 unmapped pages. File I/O will use these pages for the next read/write requests and the unmapped pages increase. After the zone has filled up again zone reclaim will remove it again after only 32 pages. This cycle is too inefficient and there are potentially too many zone reclaim cycles. With the 1% boundary we may still remove all unmapped pages for file I/O in zone reclaim pass. However. it will take a large number of read and writes to get back to 1% again where we trigger zone reclaim again. The zone reclaim 2.6.16/17 does not show this behavior because we have a 30 second timeout. [akpm@osdl.org: rename the /proc file and the variable] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- kernel/sysctl.c | 11 +++++++++++ 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+) (limited to 'kernel') diff --git a/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c index 99a58f279077..362a0cc37138 100644 --- a/kernel/sysctl.c +++ b/kernel/sysctl.c @@ -932,6 +932,17 @@ static ctl_table vm_table[] = { .strategy = &sysctl_intvec, .extra1 = &zero, }, + { + .ctl_name = VM_MIN_UNMAPPED, + .procname = "min_unmapped_ratio", + .data = &sysctl_min_unmapped_ratio, + .maxlen = sizeof(sysctl_min_unmapped_ratio), + .mode = 0644, + .proc_handler = &sysctl_min_unmapped_ratio_sysctl_handler, + .strategy = &sysctl_intvec, + .extra1 = &zero, + .extra2 = &one_hundred, + }, #endif #ifdef CONFIG_X86_32 { -- cgit v1.2.1