Re: Is there a way to do an architecture specific shake of memory?

[Robin Holt <holt@sgi.com>]

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 06:35:07PM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Robin Holt wrote:
> 
> > Any suggestions are welcome.
> 
> Check when you free items how long the list of free items is and if its
> too long free some of them.

That is done as well as a check from cpu_idle.  The amount of free is
being changed from a boot-time very large number computed from total
memory to a per-node percentage of free memory.  A concern was raised
for the eventuality of a process constantly running on a cpu so the idle
calls never happen, a memory hog application begins to consume memory on
the node, and nothing ever shakes the memory free from the quicklists.
This led to the suggestion of a timer based shaker.  I would rather put
it into the blocked allocation path than have it timer based and hope
we pick the correct resolution of timer.  The problem is the quicklists
are per-cpu so we need to try flushing the quicklists for the cpus on
the affected node.

Thanks,
Robin Holt
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