Don't trigger congestion wait on dirty-but-not-writeout pages
authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Sun, 8 Jun 2014 21:17:00 +0000 (14:17 -0700)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Mon, 28 Jul 2014 15:06:03 +0000 (08:06 -0700)
commit15c37d7780a8a807d778c57ca647beb2c8df4e71
tree4e0c598390a5f573d60952e53b062ccf5a9be141
parent3e34e4d85a3918cc4e22e160ee843d28d1954103
Don't trigger congestion wait on dirty-but-not-writeout pages

commit b738d764652dc5aab1c8939f637112981fce9e0e upstream.

shrink_inactive_list() used to wait 0.1s to avoid congestion when all
the pages that were isolated from the inactive list were dirty but not
under active writeback.  That makes no real sense, and apparently causes
major interactivity issues under some loads since 3.11.

The ostensible reason for it was to wait for kswapd to start writing
pages, but that seems questionable as well, since the congestion wait
code seems to trigger for kswapd itself as well.  Also, the logic behind
delaying anything when we haven't actually started writeback is not
clear - it only delays actually starting that writeback.

We'll still trigger the congestion waiting if

 (a) the process is kswapd, and we hit pages flagged for immediate
     reclaim

 (b) the process is not kswapd, and the zone backing dev writeback is
     actually congested.

This probably needs to be revisited, but as it is this fixes a reported
regression.

Reported-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Pinpointed-by: Hillf Danton <dhillf@gmail.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
[mhocko@suse.cz: backport to 3.12 stable tree]
Fixes: e2be15f6c3ee ('mm: vmscan: stall page reclaim and writeback pages based on dirty/writepage pages encountered')
Reported-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Pinpointed-by: Hillf Danton <dhillf@gmail.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
mm/vmscan.c