tree 4d22a28cf28abded5f77daef5b025c04d1ffea56
parent 41e9b63b35b52cf918a4ffdb8d77862ab824aa8b
author Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> 1136535074 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org> 1136565207 -0800

[PATCH] vmscan: balancing fix

Revert a patch which went into 2.6.8-rc1.  The changelog for that patch was:

  The shrink_zone() logic can, under some circumstances, cause far too many
  pages to be reclaimed.  Say, we're scanning at high priority and suddenly
  hit a large number of reclaimable pages on the LRU.

  Change things so we bale out when SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages have been
  reclaimed.

Problem is, this change caused significant imbalance in inter-zone scan
balancing by truncating scans of larger zones.

Suppose, for example, ZONE_HIGHMEM is 10x the size of ZONE_NORMAL.  The zone
balancing algorithm would require that if we're scanning 100 pages of
ZONE_HIGHMEM, we should scan 10 pages of ZONE_NORMAL.  But this logic will
cause the scanning of ZONE_HIGHMEM to bale out after only 32 pages are
reclaimed.  Thus effectively causing smaller zones to be scanned relatively
harder than large ones.

Now I need to remember what the workload was which caused me to write this
patch originally, then fix it up in a different way...

Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>