From d741c9cdeee6a569dae0dbbaf028065402955b59 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Robin Dong Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 16:29:05 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] 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: Robin Dong Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner Cc: Wu Fengguang Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/swap.c | 11 ++++++++++- 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/mm/swap.c b/mm/swap.c index 77825883298f..f76c76c7501b 100644 --- a/mm/swap.c +++ b/mm/swap.c @@ -446,13 +446,22 @@ void mark_page_accessed(struct page *page) } EXPORT_SYMBOL(mark_page_accessed); +/* + * Order of operations is important: flush the pagevec when it's already + * full, not when adding the last page, to make sure that last page is + * not added to the LRU directly when passed to this function. Because + * mark_page_accessed() (called after this when writing) only activates + * pages that are on the LRU, linear writes in subpage chunks would see + * every PAGEVEC_SIZE page activated, which is unexpected. + */ void __lru_cache_add(struct page *page, enum lru_list lru) { struct pagevec *pvec = &get_cpu_var(lru_add_pvecs)[lru]; page_cache_get(page); - if (!pagevec_add(pvec, page)) + if (!pagevec_space(pvec)) __pagevec_lru_add(pvec, lru); + pagevec_add(pvec, page); put_cpu_var(lru_add_pvecs); } EXPORT_SYMBOL(__lru_cache_add); -- 2.34.1