quoted

On Thu, 2014-01-02 at 16:56 -0800, Eric Dumazet wrote:

Hmm... it looks like I missed __GFP_NORETRY

diff --git a/net/core/sock.c b/net/core/sock.c
index 5393b4b719d7..5f42a4d70cb2 100644
--- a/net/core/sock.c
+++ b/net/core/sock.c

@@ -1872,7 +1872,7 @@ bool skb_page_frag_refill(unsigned int sz, struct page_frag *pfrag, gfp_t prio)
                gfp_t gfp = prio;

                if (order)
-                       gfp |= __GFP_COMP | __GFP_NOWARN;
+                       gfp |= __GFP_COMP | __GFP_NOWARN | __GFP_NORETRY;
                pfrag->page = alloc_pages(gfp, order);
                if (likely(pfrag->page)) {
                        pfrag->offset = 0;

There is another patch needed (looks like good stable fixes):

diff --git a/net/core/skbuff.c b/net/core/skbuff.c
index 06e72d3..d42d48c 100644
--- a/net/core/skbuff.c
+++ b/net/core/skbuff.c

@@ -378,7 +378,7 @@ refill:
                        gfp_t gfp = gfp_mask;

                        if (order)
-                               gfp |= __GFP_COMP | __GFP_NOWARN;
+                               gfp |= __GFP_COMP | __GFP_NOWARN |

__GFP_NORETRY;
                        nc->frag.page = alloc_pages(gfp, order);
                        if (likely(nc->frag.page))
                                break;

This reduces the really pathological compact/reclaim behavior but
doesn't fix it. Actually it still really quite bad because the whole
thing loops until it gets to order-0 so it's effectively trying the
allocation 4 times anyway. I typically see non-zero order allocations
very rarely without these two pieces of code. I hotpatched a running
system to get results from this quickly. Even setting the max order to
order-1 I still see bad behavior. If anything this behavior should be
conditional until this is ironed out.

Performance data: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/6687527/

-Debabrata