This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled
mm: consider all swapped back pages in used-once logic
to the 3.4-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary
The filename of the patch is:
mm-consider-all-swapped-back-pages-in-used-once-logic.patch
and it can be found in the queue-3.4 subdirectory.
If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree,
please let <[email protected]> know about it.
>From e48982734ea0500d1eba4f9d96195acc5406cad6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 15:06:45 -0700
Subject: mm: consider all swapped back pages in used-once logic
From: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
commit e48982734ea0500d1eba4f9d96195acc5406cad6 upstream.
Commit 645747462435 ("vmscan: detect mapped file pages used only once")
made mapped pages have another round in inactive list because they might
be just short lived and so we could consider them again next time. This
heuristic helps to reduce pressure on the active list with a streaming
IO worklods.
This patch fixes a regression introduced by this commit for heavy shmem
based workloads because unlike Anon pages, which are excluded from this
heuristic because they are usually long lived, shmem pages are handled
as a regular page cache.
This doesn't work quite well, unfortunately, if the workload is mostly
backed by shmem (in memory database sitting on 80% of memory) with a
streaming IO in the background (backup - up to 20% of memory). Anon
inactive list is full of (dirty) shmem pages when watermarks are hit.
Shmem pages are kept in the inactive list (they are referenced) in the
first round and it is hard to reclaim anything else so we reach lower
scanning priorities very quickly which leads to an excessive swap out.
Let's fix this by excluding all swap backed pages (they tend to be long
lived wrt. the regular page cache anyway) from used-once heuristic and
rather activate them if they are referenced.
The customer's workload is shmem backed database (80% of RAM) and they
are measuring transactions/s with an IO in the background (20%).
Transactions touch more or less random rows in the table. The
transaction rate fell by a factor of 3 (in the worst case) because of
commit 64574746. This patch restores the previous numbers.
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Cc: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Cc: Minchan Kim <[email protected]>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>
---
mm/vmscan.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -722,7 +722,7 @@ static enum page_references page_check_r
return PAGEREF_RECLAIM;
if (referenced_ptes) {
- if (PageAnon(page))
+ if (PageSwapBacked(page))
return PAGEREF_ACTIVATE;
/*
* All mapped pages start out with page table
Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are
queue-3.4/mm-consider-all-swapped-back-pages-in-used-once-logic.patch
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