Badari Pulavarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tue, 2005-07-26 at 16:07 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > > Badari Pulavarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > Here is the data with 5 ext2 filesystems. I also collected /proc/meminfo > > > every 5 seconds. As you can see, we seem to dirty 6GB of data in 20 > > > seconds of starting the test. I am not sure if its bad, since we have > > > lots of free memory.. > > > > It's bad. The logic in balance_dirty_pages() should block those write() > > callers as soon as we hit 40% dirty memory or whatever is in > > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio. So something is horridly busted. > > > > Can you try reducing the number of filesystems even further? > > Single ext2 filesystem. We still dirty pretty quickly (data collected > every 5 seconds).
It happens here, a bit. My machine goes up to 60% dirty when it should be clamping at 40%. The variable `total_pages' in page-writeback.c (from nr_free_pagecache_pages()) is too high. I trace it back to here: On node 0 totalpages: 1572864 DMA zone: 4096 pages, LIFO batch:1 Normal zone: 1568768 pages, LIFO batch:31 HighMem zone: 0 pages, LIFO batch:1 This machine only has 4G of memory, so the platform code is overestimating the number of pages by 50%. Can you please check your dmesg, see if your system is also getting this wrong? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/