Re: bdflush defaults bugreport

["Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@redhat.com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 5 Sep 1999 09:58:56 +0200 (CEST), Rik van Riel
<riel@humbolt.geo.uu.nl> said:

> yesterday evening I've seen a 32MB machine failing to install because
> mke2fs was killed due to memory shortage -- memory shortage due to
> a too large number of dirty blocks (max 40% by default).

In the past, such problems were mainly due to the refile_buffer() code
not limiting the write rate of heavy buffer cache writes more than
anything else.

> Lowering the number to 1% solved all problems, so I guess we should
> lower the number in the kernel to something like 10%, which should
> be _more_ than enough since the page cache can now be dirty too...

That is not a clean solution: it's just imposing an unnecessary
performance on the whole cache when the problem probably lies
elsewhere.  

> Btw, the problem happened on a 2.2.10 machine

In 2.2, the page cache cannot be dirty in this sense.

--Stephen
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