vmscan: have kswapd sleep for a short interval and double check it should be asleep
authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:58:53 +0000 (17:58 -0800)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:53:16 +0000 (08:53 -0800)
commitf50de2d3811081957156b5d736778799379c29de
treeddc3676bcaa26e2e55e18e57928b5c8331a0f0fa
parent273f047e36d83179573dc7e3a8af6aceaa8c599e
vmscan: have kswapd sleep for a short interval and double check it should be asleep

After kswapd balances all zones in a pgdat, it goes to sleep.  In the
event of no IO congestion, kswapd can go to sleep very shortly after the
high watermark was reached.  If there are a constant stream of allocations
from parallel processes, it can mean that kswapd went to sleep too quickly
and the high watermark is not being maintained for sufficient length time.

This patch makes kswapd go to sleep as a two-stage process.  It first
tries to sleep for HZ/10.  If it is woken up by another process or the
high watermark is no longer met, it's considered a premature sleep and
kswapd continues work.  Otherwise it goes fully to sleep.

This adds more counters to distinguish between fast and slow breaches of
watermarks.  A "fast" premature sleep is one where the low watermark was
hit in a very short time after kswapd going to sleep.  A "slow" premature
sleep indicates that the high watermark was breached after a very short
interval.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
include/linux/vmstat.h
mm/vmscan.c
mm/vmstat.c