From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3D48639C.E0EF9B71@zip.com.au> Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:24:28 -0700 From: Andrew Morton MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: throttling dirtiers References: <3D485775.14A8B483@zip.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: Benjamin LaHaise , William Lee Irwin III , "linux-mm@kvack.org" List-ID: Rik van Riel wrote: > > On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > > These ingredients are already in 2.4-rmap. > > > > It doesn't seem to work. The -ac kernel has weird stalls on > > storms of ext3 writeback. > > Maybe you shouldn't have cut off the other line from my > 2-line mail ;))) > > The most probable reason for the stalls is the fact that > page_launder (like shrink_cache) will try to write out > the complete inactive list if it's almost full of dirty > pages, so the system will still be stuck in __get_request_wait > seconds after the first few megabytes of the paged out > inactive pages have been cleaned already. I doubt if it's that, although it might be. It happens just during a kernel build, 768M of RAM. And/or during big CVS operations. Possibly it's due to ext3 checkpointing. In ordered data mode with these workloads, kupdate should normally be doing that, so it may be a kupdate problem, or a missing wakeup_bdflush. It's not a big issue - people would be unlikely to notice unless they were switching between kernels, and were ravingly impatient, like me. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/