Re: [PATCH] (2/2) reverse mappings for current 2.5.23 VM

[Daniel Phillips]

On Wednesday 19 June 2002 22:09, Craig Kulesa wrote:
> I wouldn't draw _any_ conclusions about either patch yet, because as you 
> said, it's only one type of load.  And it was a single tick in vmstat 
> where page_launder() was aggressive that made the difference between the 
> two.  In a different test, where I had actually *used* more of the 
> application pages instead of simply closing most of the applications 
> (save one, the memory hog), the results are likely to have been very 
> different.  
> 
> I think that Rik's right: this simply points out that page_launder(), at 
> least in its interaction with 2.5, needs some tuning.  I think both 
> approaches look very promising, but each for different reasons.  

Indeed.

One reason for being interested in a lot more numbers and a variety of loads 
is that there's an effect, predicted by Andea, that I'm watching for:  both 
aging+rmap and lru+rmap do swapout in random order with respect to virtual 
memory, and this should in theory cause increased seeking on swap-in.  We 
didn't see any sign of such degradation vs mainline, in fact we saw a 
significant overall speedup.  It could be we just haven't got enough data 
yet, or maybe there really is more seeking for each swap-in, but the effect 
of less swapping overall is dominant.

-- 
Daniel