Re: Caching/buffers become useless after some time

[Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>]

On 08/23/2018 02:21 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Thu 23-08-18 14:10:28, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
>> It also shows that all orders except order-9 are in fact plentiful.
>> Michal's earlier summary of the trace shows that most allocations are up
>> to order-3 and should be fine, the exception is THP:
>>
>>     277 9 GFP_TRANSHUGE|__GFP_THISNODE
> 
> But please note that this is not from the time when the page cache
> dropped to the observed values. So we do not know what happened at the
> time.

Okay, we didn't observe it drop, but there must still be something going
on that keeps it from growing back?

> Anyway 277 THP pages paging out such a large page cache amount would be
> more than unexpected even for explicitly costly THP fault in methods.

It's 277 in 90 seconds. But it seems no reclaim should happen there
anyway, because shrink_zones() should evaluate compaction_ready() as
true and skip the zones. Unless there is some kind of bug, maybe e.g.
ZONE_DMA returns compaction_ready() as false, causing the whole node to
be reclaimed? Hmm.