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From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au>
Cc: nathans@sgi.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: Page cache write performance issue
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 01:39:41 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20041013013941.49693816.akpm@osdl.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <416CE423.3000607@cyberone.com.au>

Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au> wrote:
>
>  Andrew probably has better ideas.

uh, is this an ia32 highmem box?

If so, you've hit the VM sour spot.  That 128M highmem zone gets 100%
filled with dirty pages and we end up doing a ton of writeout off the page
LRU.  And we do that while `dd' is cheerfully writing to a totally
different part of the disk via balance_dirty_pages().  Seekstorm ensues. 
Although last time I looked (a long time ago) the slowdown was only 2:1 -
perhaps your disk is in writethrough mode??

Basically, *any* other config is fine.  896MB and below, 1.5GB and above.

I could well understand that a minor kswapd tweak would make this bad
situation worse.  Making the dirty ratios really small (dirty_ratio less
than the 128MB) should make it go away.

If it's not ia32 then dunno.
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  reply	other threads:[~2004-10-13  8:39 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2004-10-13  5:44 Nathan Scott
2004-10-13  6:19 ` Andrew Morton
2004-10-13  6:39   ` Nathan Scott
2004-10-13  7:02     ` Andrew Morton
2004-10-13  7:23       ` Nathan Scott
2004-10-13  8:15         ` Nick Piggin
2004-10-13  8:39           ` Andrew Morton [this message]
2004-10-14  0:53             ` Nathan Scott
2004-10-14  3:20               ` Andrew Morton
2004-10-14  7:16                 ` Nathan Scott
2004-10-14  7:31                   ` Nick Piggin

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