Page reclaim force-scans / swaps anonymous pages when file cache drops
below the high watermark of a zone in order to prevent what little cache
remains from thrashing.
However, on bigger machines the high watermark value can be quite large
and when the workload is dominated by a static anonymous/shmem set, the
file set might just be a small window of used-once cache. In such
situations, the VM starts swapping heavily when instead it should be
recycling the no longer used cache.
This is a longer-standing problem, but it's more likely to trigger after
commit 81c0a2bb51 ("mm: page_alloc: fair zone allocator policy")
because file pages can no longer accumulate in a single zone and are
dispersed into smaller fractions among the available zones.
To resolve this, do not force scan anon when file pages are low but
instead rely on the scan/rotation ratios to make the right prediction.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Suleiman Souhlal <suleiman@google.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [3.12+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
0bf1457f0c