mm: vmscan: when reclaiming for compaction, ensure there are sufficient free pages...
authorMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:19:45 +0000 (17:19 -0800)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:13:09 +0000 (20:13 -0800)
commitfe4b1b244bdb96136855f2c694071cb09d140766
treec1fafe7ef5b5bd7c77ae981b47fa82916e0436eb
parenta6bc32b899223a877f595ef9ddc1e89ead5072b8
mm: vmscan: when reclaiming for compaction, ensure there are sufficient free pages available

In commit e0887c19 ("vmscan: limit direct reclaim for higher order
allocations"), Rik noted that reclaim was too aggressive when THP was
enabled.  In his initial patch he used the number of free pages to decide
if reclaim should abort for compaction.  My feedback was that reclaim and
compaction should be using the same logic when deciding if reclaim should
be aborted.

Unfortunately, this had the effect of reducing THP success rates when the
workload included something like streaming reads that continually
allocated pages.  The window during which compaction could run and return
a THP was too small.

This patch combines Rik's two patches together.  compaction_suitable() is
still used to decide if reclaim should be aborted to allow compaction is
used.  However, it will also ensure that there is a reasonable buffer of
free pages available.  This improves upon the THP allocation success rates
but bounds the number of pages that are freed for compaction.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel<riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Andy Isaacson <adi@hexapodia.org>
Cc: Nai Xia <nai.xia@gmail.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/vmscan.c