Comment 603 for bug 595047

Revision history for this message
In , kernel (kernel-linux-kernel-bugs) wrote :

(In reply to comment #567)
> Maybe this:
> http://lwn.net/Articles/467328/

Interesting. Thanks for the link. However, this article doesn't explain why we see thrashing and extremely degraded interactivity on systems that don't have HugeTLB support enabled in the kernel (such as mine). This reinforces the point that there are many scenarios that exhibit poor interactive responsiveness under heavy disk writing load.

Regarding this debate about the transparent huge pages, I have to wonder why the kernel would bother trying to create a huge page in a location where there are dirty pages waiting to be written to disk. Shouldn't it just choose some other area in RAM that doesn't intersect any dirty buffers? This isn't really the place for a discussion of page compaction, though, so I'll discourage anyone from responding to my idle musing here.