From 4f92e2586b43a2402e116055d4edda704f911b5b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mel Gorman Date: Mon, 24 May 2010 14:32:32 -0700 Subject: mm: compaction: defer compaction using an exponential backoff when compaction fails The fragmentation index may indicate that a failure is due to external fragmentation but after a compaction run completes, it is still possible for an allocation to fail. There are two obvious reasons as to why o Page migration cannot move all pages so fragmentation remains o A suitable page may exist but watermarks are not met In the event of compaction followed by an allocation failure, this patch defers further compaction in the zone (1 << compact_defer_shift) times. If the next compaction attempt also fails, compact_defer_shift is increased up to a maximum of 6. If compaction succeeds, the defer counters are reset again. The zone that is deferred is the first zone in the zonelist - i.e. the preferred zone. To defer compaction in the other zones, the information would need to be stored in the zonelist or implemented similar to the zonelist_cache. This would impact the fast-paths and is not justified at this time. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Cc: Rik van Riel Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- include/linux/mmzone.h | 9 +++++++++ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+) (limited to 'include/linux/mmzone.h') diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h index cf9e458e96b0..fd55f725a09e 100644 --- a/include/linux/mmzone.h +++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h @@ -321,6 +321,15 @@ struct zone { unsigned long *pageblock_flags; #endif /* CONFIG_SPARSEMEM */ +#ifdef CONFIG_COMPACTION + /* + * On compaction failure, 1<