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Andrew Morton authored
Writeback parameter tuning. Somewhat experimental, but heading in the right direction, I hope. - Allowing 40% of physical memory to be dirtied on massive ia32 boxes is unreasonable. It pins too many buffer_heads and contribues to page reclaim latency. The patch changes the initial value of /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio, dirty_async_ratio and (the presently non-functional) dirty_sync_ratio so that they are reduced when the highmem:lowmem ratio exceeds 4:1. These ratios are scaled so that as the highmem:lowmem ratio goes beyond 4:1, the maximum amount of allowed dirty memory ceases to increase. It is clamped at the amount of memory which a 4:1 machine is allowed to use. - Aggressive reduction in the dirty memory threshold at which background writeback cuts in. 2.4 uses 30% of ZONE_NORMAL. 2.5 uses 40% of total memory. This patch changes it to 10% of total memory (if total memory <= 4G. Even less otherwise - see above). This means that: - Much more writeback is performed by pdflush. - When the application is generating dirty data at a moderate rate, background writeback cuts in much earlier, so memory is cleaned more promptly. - Reduces the risk of user applications getting stalled by writeback. - Will damage dbench numbers. It turns out that the damage is fairly small, and dbench isn't a worthwhile workload for optimisation. - Moderate reduction in the dirty level at which the write(2) caller is forced to perform writeback (throttling). Was 40% of total memory. Is now 30% of total memory (if total memory <= 4G, less otherwise). This is to reduce page reclaim latency, and generally because allowing processes to flood the machine with dirty data is a bad thing in mixed workloads.
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