Re: Comment on patch to remove nr_async_pages limit

[Mike Galbraith]

On Sat, 9 Jun 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On 5 Jun 2001, Zlatko Calusic wrote:
> > Marcelo Tosatti <[e-mail]> writes:
> >
> > [snip]
> > > Exactly. And when we reach a low watermark of memory, we start writting
> > > out the anonymous memory.
> >
> > Hm, my observations are a little bit different. I find that writeouts
> > happen sooner than the moment we reach low watermark, and many times
> > just in time to interact badly with some read I/O workload that made a
> > virtual shortage of memory in the first place.
>
> I have a patch that tries to address this by not reordering
> the inactive list whenever we scan through it. I'll post it
> right now ...

Excellent.  I've done some of that (crude but effective) and have had
nice encouraging results.  If the dirty list is long enough, this
most definitely improves behavior under heavy load.

	-Mike