mm: vmscan: do not swap anon pages just because free+file is low
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 81c0a2bb ("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>
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