When writing a new file with 2048 bytes buffer, such as write(fd, buffer,
2048), it will call generic_perform_write() twice for every page:
write_begin
mark_page_accessed(page)
write_end
write_begin
mark_page_accessed(page)
write_end
Pages 1-13 will be added to lru-pvecs in write_begin() and will *NOT* be
added to active_list even they have be accessed twice because they are not
PageLRU(page). But when page 14th comes, all pages in lru-pvecs will be
moved to inactive_list (by __lru_cache_add() ) in first write_begin(), now
page 14th *is* PageLRU(page). And after second write_end() only page 14th
will be in active_list.
In Hadoop environment, we do comes to this situation: after writing a
file, we find out that only 14th, 28th, 42th... page are in active_list
and others in inactive_list. Now kswapd works, shrinks the inactive_list,
the file only have 14th, 28th...pages in memory, the readahead request
size will be broken to only 52k (13*4k), system's performance falls
dramatically.
This problem can also replay by below steps (the machine has 8G memory):
1. dd if=/dev/zero of=/test/file.out bs=1024 count=1048576
2. cat another 7.5G file to /dev/null
3. vmtouch -m 1G -v /test/file.out, it will show:
/test/file.out
[oooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO] 187847/262144
the 'o' means same pages are in memory but same are not.
The solution for this problem is simple: the 14th page should be added to
lru_add_pvecs before mark_page_accessed() just as other pages.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak comment]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: grab better comment from the v3 patch]
Signed-off-by: Robin Dong <sanbai@taobao.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
d741c9cdee