On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 11:43:36PM +0900, Minchan Kim wrote:

Recently, there are reported problem about thrashing.
(http://marc.info/?l=rsync&m=128885034930933&w=2)
It happens by backup workloads(ex, nightly rsync).
That's because the workload makes just use-once pages
and touches pages twice. It promotes the page into
active list so that it results in working set page eviction.

Some app developer want to support POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE.
But other OSes don't support it, either.
(http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=128928979512086&w=2)

By other approach, app developers use POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED.
But it has a problem. If kernel meets page is writing
during invalidate_mapping_pages, it can't work.
It makes for application programmer to use it since they always
have to sync data before calling fadivse(..POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) to
make sure the pages could be discardable. At last, they can't use
deferred write of kernel so that they could see performance loss.
(http://insights.oetiker.ch/linux/fadvise.html)

In fact, invalidation is very big hint to reclaimer.
It means we don't use the page any more. So let's move
the writing page into inactive list's head if we can't truncate
it right now.

Why I move page to head of lru on this patch, Dirty/Writeback page
would be flushed sooner or later. It can prevent writeout of pageout
which is less effective than flusher's writeout.

Originally, I reused lru_demote of Peter with some change so added
his Signed-off-by.

Reported-by: Ben Gamari <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <redacted>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <redacted>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <redacted>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <redacted>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Nick Piggin <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <redacted>

Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>

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