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authorChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>2006-09-25 23:31:52 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org>2006-09-26 08:48:51 -0700
commit0ff38490c836dc379ff7ec45b10a15a662f4e5f6 (patch)
treecb42d5d3cace3c8d12f0b304879039c503807981 /Documentation/sysctl
parent972d1a7b140569084439a81265a0f15b74e924e0 (diff)
downloadlinux-0ff38490c836dc379ff7ec45b10a15a662f4e5f6.tar.bz2
[PATCH] zone_reclaim: dynamic slab reclaim
Currently one can enable slab reclaim by setting an explicit option in /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode. Slab reclaim is then used as a final option if the freeing of unmapped file backed pages is not enough to free enough pages to allow a local allocation. However, that means that the slab can grow excessively and that most memory of a node may be used by slabs. We have had a case where a machine with 46GB of memory was using 40-42GB for slab. Zone reclaim was effective in dealing with pagecache pages. However, slab reclaim was only done during global reclaim (which is a bit rare on NUMA systems). This patch implements slab reclaim during zone reclaim. Zone reclaim occurs if there is a danger of an off node allocation. At that point we 1. Shrink the per node page cache if the number of pagecache pages is more than min_unmapped_ratio percent of pages in a zone. 2. Shrink the slab cache if the number of the nodes reclaimable slab pages (patch depends on earlier one that implements that counter) are more than min_slab_ratio (a new /proc/sys/vm tunable). The shrinking of the slab cache is a bit problematic since it is not node specific. So we simply calculate what point in the slab we want to reach (current per node slab use minus the number of pages that neeed to be allocated) and then repeately run the global reclaim until that is unsuccessful or we have reached the limit. I hope we will have zone based slab reclaim at some point which will make that easier. The default for the min_slab_ratio is 5% Also remove the slab option from /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode. [akpm@osdl.org: cleanups] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sysctl')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt27
1 files changed, 20 insertions, 7 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 7cee90223d3a..20d0d797f539 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
- drop-caches
- zone_reclaim_mode
- min_unmapped_ratio
+- min_slab_ratio
- panic_on_oom
==============================================================
@@ -138,7 +139,6 @@ This is value ORed together of
1 = Zone reclaim on
2 = Zone reclaim writes dirty pages out
4 = Zone reclaim swaps pages
-8 = Also do a global slab reclaim pass
zone_reclaim_mode is set during bootup to 1 if it is determined that pages
from remote zones will cause a measurable performance reduction. The
@@ -162,18 +162,13 @@ Allowing regular swap effectively restricts allocations to the local
node unless explicitly overridden by memory policies or cpuset
configurations.
-It may be advisable to allow slab reclaim if the system makes heavy
-use of files and builds up large slab caches. However, the slab
-shrink operation is global, may take a long time and free slabs
-in all nodes of the system.
-
=============================================================
min_unmapped_ratio:
This is available only on NUMA kernels.
-A percentage of the file backed pages in each zone. Zone reclaim will only
+A percentage of the total pages in each zone. Zone reclaim will only
occur if more than this percentage of pages are file backed and unmapped.
This is to insure that a minimal amount of local pages is still available for
file I/O even if the node is overallocated.
@@ -182,6 +177,24 @@ The default is 1 percent.
=============================================================
+min_slab_ratio:
+
+This is available only on NUMA kernels.
+
+A percentage of the total pages in each zone. On Zone reclaim
+(fallback from the local zone occurs) slabs will be reclaimed if more
+than this percentage of pages in a zone are reclaimable slab pages.
+This insures that the slab growth stays under control even in NUMA
+systems that rarely perform global reclaim.
+
+The default is 5 percent.
+
+Note that slab reclaim is triggered in a per zone / node fashion.
+The process of reclaiming slab memory is currently not node specific
+and may not be fast.
+
+=============================================================
+
panic_on_oom
This enables or disables panic on out-of-memory feature. If this is set to 1,