From 4eda48235011d6965f5229f8955ddcd355311570 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Johannes Weiner Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2017 14:56:20 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] mm: vmscan: only write dirty pages that the scanner has seen twice Dirty pages can easily reach the end of the LRU while there are still clean pages to reclaim around. Don't let kswapd write them back just because there are a lot of them. It costs more CPU to find the clean pages, but that's almost certainly better than to disrupt writeback from the flushers with LRU-order single-page writes from reclaim. And the flushers have been woken up by that point, so we spend IO capacity on flushing and CPU capacity on finding the clean cache. Only start writing dirty pages if they have cycled around the LRU twice now and STILL haven't been queued on the IO device. It's possible that the dirty pages are so sparsely distributed across different bdis, inodes, memory cgroups, that the flushers take forever to get to the ones we want reclaimed. Once we see them twice on the LRU, we know that's the quicker way to find them, so do LRU writeback. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170123181641.23938-5-hannes@cmpxchg.org Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Acked-by: Minchan Kim Acked-by: Michal Hocko Acked-by: Mel Gorman Acked-by: Hillf Danton Cc: Rik van Riel Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/vmscan.c | 15 ++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index ce2ee8331414..92e56cadceae 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -1153,13 +1153,18 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list, if (PageDirty(page)) { /* - * Only kswapd can writeback filesystem pages to - * avoid risk of stack overflow but only writeback - * if many dirty pages have been encountered. + * Only kswapd can writeback filesystem pages + * to avoid risk of stack overflow. But avoid + * injecting inefficient single-page IO into + * flusher writeback as much as possible: only + * write pages when we've encountered many + * dirty pages, and when we've already scanned + * the rest of the LRU for clean pages and see + * the same dirty pages again (PageReclaim). */ if (page_is_file_cache(page) && - (!current_is_kswapd() || - !test_bit(PGDAT_DIRTY, &pgdat->flags))) { + (!current_is_kswapd() || !PageReclaim(page) || + !test_bit(PGDAT_DIRTY, &pgdat->flags))) { /* * Immediately reclaim when written back. * Similar in principal to deactivate_page() -- 2.20.1