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Date:      Wed, 16 Jan 2002 10:49:04 +0000
From:      Rasputin <rasputin@submonkey.net>
To:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: what's vnlru?
Message-ID:  <20020116104904.A2800@shikima.mine.nu>
In-Reply-To: <200201160101.g0G117r64693@apollo.backplane.com>; from dillon@apollo.backplane.com on Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 05:01:07PM -0800
References:  <200201151618468.SM01176@141.com> <200201160101.g0G117r64693@apollo.backplane.com>

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* Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> [020116 01:10]:
>     vnlru is responsible for flushing and freeing vnodes when you
>     hit the kern.maxvnodes limit.  The history of this is:
> 
>     4.4 and earlier	vnodes were only freed if they had no cached pages.
> 			This could lead to a vnode blowout on machines with
> 			large amounts of ram accessing lots of small files.
> 			(the kern.maxvnodes limit was essentially ignored)
> 
>     4.4-stable		I introduced code to flush/reuse vnodes on the fly,
> 			but this lead to possible locking deadlocks.
> 
>     4.5-*		Peter introduced a separate kernel thread to deal with
> 			vnode flushing issues, 'vnlru', in order to fix the
> 			possible locking deadlocks.  The on-the-fly code
> 			was changed to only be called from the kernel thread.
> 
>     This kernel thread will generally not be very active, even on a heavily
>     loaded system.  You have to have a lot of ram and be accessing tens of
>     thousands of tiny files to activate the thread.

Thansk for the overview - it's not a performance issue, I just checked
another fairly recent (4.5 pre) BSD box and didn't see it,
so thought I'd better check it out.

[ Is this the sort of thing that should go into UPDATING? ]

Thanks to all !

-- 
Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads.
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns ::

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