that performs the equivalent of an automatic madvise(..., MADV_DONTNEED).
The current heuristic, even with the improvements that I made a few years
ago, is a good example of making the wrong trade-off, or optimizing for
the infrequent case. The infrequent case being reading a single file that
is much larger than memory using mmap(2). And, in this case, the page
daemon isn't the bottleneck; it's the I/O.
In all other cases, the current heuristic has too many false positives,
i.e., it caches too many pages that are later reused. To give one
example, thousands of pages are cached by the current heuristic during a
buildworld and all of them are reactivated before the buildworld
completes. In particular, clang reads source files using mmap(2) and
there are some relatively large source files in our source tree, e.g.,
sqlite, that are read multiple times. With the new heuristic, I see fewer
false positives and they have a much lower cost.
I actually tried something like this more than two years ago and it
didn't perform as well as the cache behind heuristic. However, that was
before the changes to the page daemon in late summer of 2013 and the
existence of pmap_advise(). In particular, with the page daemon doing
its work more frequently and in smaller batches, it now completes its
work while the application accessing the file is blocked on I/O.
Whereas previously, the page daemon appeared to hog the CPU for so long
that it caused "hiccups" in the application's execution.
Finally, I'll add that the elimination of cache pages is a prerequisite
for NUMA support.
Reviewed by: jeff, kib
Sponsored by: EMC / Isilon Storage Division
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