linux-kernel - Re: The performance and behaviour of the anti-fragmentation related patches

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Date:	Fri, 02 Mar 2007 10:31:39 -0600
From:	Joel Schopp <jschopp@...tin.ibm.com>
To:	Mel Gorman <mel@....ul.ie>
CC:	Bill Irwin <bill.irwin@...cle.com>, akpm@...ux-foundation.org,
	npiggin@...e.de, clameter@...r.sgi.com, mingo@...e.hu,
	arjan@...radead.org, torvalds@...l.org, mbligh@...igh.org,
	Linux Memory Management List <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: The performance and behaviour of the anti-fragmentation related
 patches

>> Exhibiting a workload where the list patch breaks down and the zone
>> patch rescues it might help if it's felt that the combination isn't as
>> good as lists in isolation. I'm sure one can be dredged up somewhere.
> 
> I can't think of a workload that totally makes a mess out of list-based. 
> However, list-based makes no guarantees on availability. If a system 
> administrator knows they need between 10,000 and 100,000 huge pages and 
> doesn't want to waste memory pinning too many huge pages at boot-time, 
> the zone-based mechanism would be what he wanted.

 From our testing with earlier versions of list based for memory hot-unplug on 
pSeries machines we were able to hot-unplug huge amounts of memory after running the 
nastiest workloads we could find for over a week.  Without the patches we were unable 
to hot-unplug anything within minutes of running the same workloads.

If something works for 99.999% of people (list based) and there is an easy way to 
configure it for the other 0.001% of the people ("zone" based) I call that a great 
solution.  I really don't understand what the resistance is to these patches.

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