From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 19:32:13 -0300 (BRT) From: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: throttling dirtiers In-Reply-To: <3D48639C.E0EF9B71@zip.com.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Andrew Morton Cc: Benjamin LaHaise , William Lee Irwin III , "linux-mm@kvack.org" List-ID: On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Andrew Morton wrote: > > 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. Indeed, my scenario above is unlikely to be the reason with these workloads. However, I have noticed the problem with fillmem, or just when the system has the sudden urge to swapout a large process ;) regards, Rik -- Bravely reimplemented by the knights who say "NIH". http://www.surriel.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/ -- 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/