Commit 1b2ffb78 authored by Christoph Lameter's avatar Christoph Lameter Committed by Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Zone reclaim: Allow modification of zone reclaim behavior

In some situations one may want zone_reclaim to behave differently.  For
example a process writing large amounts of memory will spew unto other nodes
to cache the writes if many pages in a zone become dirty.  This may impact the
performance of processes running on other nodes.

Allowing writes during reclaim puts a stop to that behavior and throttles the
process by restricting the pages to the local zone.

Similarly one may want to contain processes to local memory by enabling
regular swap behavior during zone_reclaim.  Off node memory allocation can
then be controlled through memory policies and cpusets.
Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
parent 2a11ff06
......@@ -127,17 +127,39 @@ the high water marks for each per cpu page list.
zone_reclaim_mode:
This is set during bootup to 1 if it is determined that pages from
remote zones will cause a significant performance reduction. The
Zone_reclaim_mode allows to set more or less agressive approaches to
reclaim memory when a zone runs out of memory. If it is set to zero then no
zone reclaim occurs. Allocations will be satisfied from other zones / nodes
in the system.
This is value ORed together of
1 = Zone reclaim on
2 = Zone reclaim writes dirty pages out
4 = Zone reclaim swaps pages
zone_reclaim_mode is set during bootup to 1 if it is determined that pages
from remote zones will cause a measurable performance reduction. The
page allocator will then reclaim easily reusable pages (those page
cache pages that are currently not used) before going off node.
cache pages that are currently not used) before allocating off node pages.
It may be beneficial to switch off zone reclaim if the system is
used for a file server and all of memory should be used for caching files
from disk. In that case the caching effect is more important than
data locality.
Allowing zone reclaim to write out pages stops processes that are
writing large amounts of data from dirtying pages on other nodes. Zone
reclaim will write out dirty pages if a zone fills up and so effectively
throttle the process. This may decrease the performance of a single process
since it cannot use all of system memory to buffer the outgoing writes
anymore but it preserve the memory on other nodes so that the performance
of other processes running on other nodes will not be affected.
The user can override this setting. It may be beneficial to switch
off zone reclaim if the system is used for a file server and all
of memory should be used for caching files from disk.
Allowing regular swap effectively restricts allocations to the local
node unless explicitly overridden by memory policies or cpuset
configurations.
It may be beneficial to switch this on if one wants to do zone
reclaim regardless of the numa distances in the system.
================================================================
zone_reclaim_interval:
......
......@@ -1592,6 +1592,11 @@ module_init(kswapd_init)
*/
int zone_reclaim_mode __read_mostly;
#define RECLAIM_OFF 0
#define RECLAIM_ZONE (1<<0) /* Run shrink_cache on the zone */
#define RECLAIM_WRITE (1<<1) /* Writeout pages during reclaim */
#define RECLAIM_SWAP (1<<2) /* Swap pages out during reclaim */
/*
* Mininum time between zone reclaim scans
*/
......@@ -1630,8 +1635,8 @@ int zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order)
if (!cpus_empty(mask) && node_id != numa_node_id())
return 0;
sc.may_writepage = 0;
sc.may_swap = 0;
sc.may_writepage = !!(zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_WRITE);
sc.may_swap = !!(zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_SWAP);
sc.nr_scanned = 0;
sc.nr_reclaimed = 0;
sc.priority = ZONE_RECLAIM_PRIORITY + 1;
......
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