Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 29 Aug 2003 08:01:11 -0700 (PDT) | From | Shantanu Goel <> | Subject | [VM PATCH] Faster reclamation of dirty pages and unused inode/dcache entries in 2.4.22 |
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Hi kernel hackers,
The VM subsystem in Linux 2.4.22 can cause spurious swapouts in the presence of lots of dirty pages. Presently, as dirty pages are encountered, shrink_cache() schedules a writepage() and moves the page to the head of the inactive list. When a lot of dirty pages are present, this can break the FIFO ordering of the inactive list because clean pages further down the list will be reclaimed first. The following patch records the pages being laundered, and once SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages have been accumulated or the scan is complete, goes back and attempts to move them back to the tail of the list.
The second part of the patch reclaims unused inode/dentry/dquot entries more aggressively. I have observed that on an NFS server where swap out activity is low, the VM can shrink the page cache to the point where most pages are used up by unused inode/dentry entries. This is because page cache reclamation succeeds most of the time except when a swap_out() happens.
Feedback and comments are welcome.
Thanks, Shantanu Goel
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