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Commit d741c9cd authored by Robin Dong's avatar Robin Dong Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm: fix nonuniform page status when writing new file with small buffer



When writing a new file with 2048 bytes buffer, such as write(fd, buffer,
2048), it will call generic_perform_write() twice for every page:

	write_begin
	mark_page_accessed(page)
	write_end

	write_begin
	mark_page_accessed(page)
	write_end

Pages 1-13 will be added to lru-pvecs in write_begin() and will *NOT* be
added to active_list even they have be accessed twice because they are not
PageLRU(page).  But when page 14th comes, all pages in lru-pvecs will be
moved to inactive_list (by __lru_cache_add() ) in first write_begin(), now
page 14th *is* PageLRU(page).  And after second write_end() only page 14th
will be in active_list.

In Hadoop environment, we do comes to this situation: after writing a
file, we find out that only 14th, 28th, 42th...  page are in active_list
and others in inactive_list.  Now kswapd works, shrinks the inactive_list,
the file only have 14th, 28th...pages in memory, the readahead request
size will be broken to only 52k (13*4k), system's performance falls
dramatically.

This problem can also replay by below steps (the machine has 8G memory):

	1. dd if=/dev/zero of=/test/file.out bs=1024 count=1048576
	2. cat another 7.5G file to /dev/null
	3. vmtouch -m 1G -v /test/file.out, it will show:

	/test/file.out
	[oooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO] 187847/262144

	the 'o' means same pages are in memory but same are not.

The solution for this problem is simple: the 14th page should be added to
lru_add_pvecs before mark_page_accessed() just as other pages.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak comment]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: grab better comment from the v3 patch]
Signed-off-by: default avatarRobin Dong <sanbai@taobao.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarMinchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 314e51b9
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