Workloads that are allocating frequently and writing files place a
large number of dirty pages on the LRU. With use-once logic, it is
possible for them to reach the end of the LRU quickly requiring the
reclaimer to scan more to find clean pages. Ordinarily, processes that
are dirtying memory will get throttled by dirty balancing but this
is a global heuristic and does not take into account that LRUs are
maintained on a per-zone basis. This can lead to a situation whereby
reclaim is scanning heavily, skipping over a large number of pages
under writeback and recycling them around the LRU consuming CPU.

This patch checks how many of the number of pages isolated from the
LRU were dirty. If a percentage of them are dirty, the process will be
throttled if a blocking device is congested or the zone being scanned
is marked congested. The percentage that must be dirty depends on
the priority. At default priority, all of them must be dirty. At
DEF_PRIORITY-1, 50% of them must be dirty, DEF_PRIORITY-2, 25%
etc. i.e.  as pressure increases the greater the likelihood the process
will get throttled to allow the flusher threads to make some progress.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
---
 mm/vmscan.c |   21 ++++++++++++++++++---
 1 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index cf7b501..b0060f8 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c

@@ -720,7 +720,8 @@ static noinline_for_stack void free_page_list(struct list_head *free_pages)
 static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 				      struct zone *zone,
 				      struct scan_control *sc,
-				      int priority)
+				      int priority,
+				      unsigned long *ret_nr_dirty)
 {
 	LIST_HEAD(ret_pages);
 	LIST_HEAD(free_pages);

@@ -971,6 +972,7 @@ keep_lumpy:
 
 	list_splice(&ret_pages, page_list);
 	count_vm_events(PGACTIVATE, pgactivate);
+	*ret_nr_dirty += nr_dirty;