Re: [PATCH] vmscan: evict use-once pages first

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 08:36:51PM -0700, Elladan wrote:
> Rik,
> 
> This patch appears to significantly improve application latency while a large
> file copy runs.  I'm not seeing behavior that implies continuous bad page
> replacement.
> 
> I'm still seeing some general lag, which I attribute to general filesystem
> slowness.  For example, latencytop sees many events like these:
> 
> down xfs_buf_lock _xfs_buf_find xfs_buf_get_flags 1475.8 msec          5.9 %

This actually is contention on the buffer lock, and most likely
happens because it's trying to access a buffer that's beeing read
in currently.

> 
> xfs_buf_iowait xfs_buf_iostart xfs_buf_read_flags 1740.9 msec          2.6 %

That's an actual metadata read.

> Writing a page to disk                            1042.9 msec         43.7 %
> 
> It also occasionally sees long page faults:
> 
> Page fault                                        2068.3 msec         21.3 %
> 
> I guess XFS (and the elevator) is just doing a poor job managing latency
> (particularly poor since all the IO on /usr/bin is on the reader disk).

The filesystem doesn't really decide which priorities to use, except
for some use of the WRITE_SYNC which is used rather minimall in XFS in
2.6.28.

> Creating block layer request                      451.4 msec         14.4 %

I guess that a wait in get_request because we're above nr_requests..