vmscan: detect mapped file pages used only once

The VM currently assumes that an inactive, mapped and referenced file page
is in use and promotes it to the active list.

However, every mapped file page starts out like this and thus a problem
arises when workloads create a stream of such pages that are used only for
a short time.  By flooding the active list with those pages, the VM
quickly gets into trouble finding eligible reclaim canditates.  The result
is long allocation latencies and eviction of the wrong pages.

This patch reuses the PG_referenced page flag (used for unmapped file
pages) to implement a usage detection that scales with the speed of LRU
list cycling (i.e.  memory pressure).

If the scanner encounters those pages, the flag is set and the page cycled
again on the inactive list.  Only if it returns with another page table
reference it is activated.  Otherwise it is reclaimed as 'not recently
used cache'.

This effectively changes the minimum lifetime of a used-once mapped file
page from a full memory cycle to an inactive list cycle, which allows it
to occur in linear streams without affecting the stable working set of the
system.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: OSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/mm/rmap.c b/mm/rmap.c
index 4d2fb93..fcd593c9 100644
--- a/mm/rmap.c
+++ b/mm/rmap.c
@@ -601,9 +601,6 @@ int page_referenced(struct page *page,
 	int referenced = 0;
 	int we_locked = 0;
 
-	if (TestClearPageReferenced(page))
-		referenced++;
-
 	*vm_flags = 0;
 	if (page_mapped(page) && page_rmapping(page)) {
 		if (!is_locked && (!PageAnon(page) || PageKsm(page))) {