On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 15:03 +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:

Changelog since V1
  o kswapd should sleep if need_resched
  o Remove __GFP_REPEAT from GFP flags when speculatively using high
    orders so direct/compaction exits earlier
  o Remove __GFP_NORETRY for correctness
  o Correct logic in sleeping_prematurely
  o Leave SLUB using the default slub_max_order

There are a few reports of people experiencing hangs when copying
large amounts of data with kswapd using a large amount of CPU which
appear to be due to recent reclaim changes.

SLUB using high orders is the trigger but not the root cause as SLUB
has been using high orders for a while. The following four patches
aim to fix the problems in reclaim while reducing the cost for SLUB
using those high orders.

Patch 1 corrects logic introduced by commit [1741c877: mm:
	kswapd: keep kswapd awake for high-order allocations until
	a percentage of the node is balanced] to allow kswapd to
	go to sleep when balanced for high orders.

Patch 2 prevents kswapd waking up in response to SLUBs speculative
	use of high orders.

Patch 3 further reduces the cost by prevent SLUB entering direct
	compaction or reclaim paths on the grounds that falling
	back to order-0 should be cheaper.

Patch 4 notes that even when kswapd is failing to keep up with
	allocation requests, it should still go to sleep when its
	quota has expired to prevent it spinning.

This all works fine for me ... three untar runs and no kswapd hangs or
pegging the CPU at 99% ... in fact, kswapd rarely gets over 20%

This isn't as good as the kswapd sleeping_prematurely() throttling
patch.  For total CPU time on a three 90GB untar run, it's about 64s of
CPU time with your patch rather than 6s, but that's vastly better than
the 15 minutes of CPU time kswapd was taking even under PREEMPT.

James


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