Thread (25 messages) 25 messages, 5 authors, 2011-10-06

Re: [PATCH 3/3] compaction accouting fix

From: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Date: 2011-09-01 14:20:33
Also in: lkml

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 01:37:43AM +0900, Minchan Kim wrote:
I saw the following accouting of compaction during test of the series.
s/accouting/accounting/ both here and in the subject. A nicer name the
patch would have been

"mm: compaction: Only update compact_blocks_moved if compaction was successful"
compact_blocks_moved 251
compact_pages_moved 44

It's very awkward to me although it's possbile because it means we try to compact 251 blocks
but it just migrated 44 pages. As further investigation, I found isolate_migratepages doesn't
isolate any pages but it returns ISOLATE_SUCCESS and then, it just increases compact_blocks_moved
but doesn't increased compact_pages_moved.

This patch makes accouting of compaction works only in case of success of isolation.
compact_blocks_moved exists to indicate the rate compaction is
scanning pageblocks. If compact_blocks_moved and compact_pages_moved
are increasing at a similar rate for example, it could imply that
compaction is doing a lot of scanning but is not necessarily useful
work. It's not necessarily reflected by compact_fail because that
counter is only updated for pages that were isolated from the LRU.

I now recognise of course that "compact_blocks_moved" was an *awful*
choice of name for this stat.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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