• Johannes Weiner's avatar
    mm: scale kswapd watermarks in proportion to memory · 795ae7a0
    Johannes Weiner authored
    In machines with 140G of memory and enterprise flash storage, we have
    seen read and write bursts routinely exceed the kswapd watermarks and
    cause thundering herds in direct reclaim.  Unfortunately, the only way
    to tune kswapd aggressiveness is through adjusting min_free_kbytes - the
    system's emergency reserves - which is entirely unrelated to the
    system's latency requirements.  In order to get kswapd to maintain a
    250M buffer of free memory, the emergency reserves need to be set to 1G.
    That is a lot of memory wasted for no good reason.
    
    On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that allocation bursts and
    overall allocation concurrency scale with memory capacity, so it makes
    sense to make kswapd aggressiveness a function of that as well.
    
    Change the kswapd watermark scale factor from the currently fixed 25% of
    the tunable emergency reserve to a tunable 0.1% of memory.
    
    Beyond 1G of memory, this will produce bigger watermark steps than the
    current formula in default settings.  Ensure that the new formula never
    chooses steps smaller than that, i.e.  25% of the emergency reserve.
    
    On a 140G machine, this raises the default watermark steps - the
    distance between min and low, and low and high - from 16M to 143M.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
    Acked-by: default avatarRik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarDavid Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
    Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    795ae7a0
vm.txt 31.6 KB