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Commit 64574746 authored by Johannes Weiner's avatar Johannes Weiner Committed by Linus Torvalds
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vmscan: detect mapped file pages used only once



The VM currently assumes that an inactive, mapped and referenced file page
is in use and promotes it to the active list.

However, every mapped file page starts out like this and thus a problem
arises when workloads create a stream of such pages that are used only for
a short time.  By flooding the active list with those pages, the VM
quickly gets into trouble finding eligible reclaim canditates.  The result
is long allocation latencies and eviction of the wrong pages.

This patch reuses the PG_referenced page flag (used for unmapped file
pages) to implement a usage detection that scales with the speed of LRU
list cycling (i.e.  memory pressure).

If the scanner encounters those pages, the flag is set and the page cycled
again on the inactive list.  Only if it returns with another page table
reference it is activated.  Otherwise it is reclaimed as 'not recently
used cache'.

This effectively changes the minimum lifetime of a used-once mapped file
page from a full memory cycle to an inactive list cycle, which allows it
to occur in linear streams without affecting the stable working set of the
system.

Signed-off-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: default avatarRik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: OSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 31c0569c
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