patch like this is "when to ignore the cached information?" If it's ignored too often, the scanning rates will still be excessive. If the information is too stale then allocations will fail that might have otherwise succeeded. In this patch o CMA always ignores the information o If the migrate and free scanner meet then the cached information will be discarded if it's at least 5 seconds since the last time the cache was discarded o If there are a large number of allocation failures, discard the cache. The time-based heuristic is very clumsy but there are few choices for a better event. Depending solely on multiple allocation failures still allows excessive scanning when THP allocations are failing in quick succession due to memory pressure. Waiting until memory pressure is relieved would cause compaction to continually fail instead of using reclaim/compaction to try allocate the page. The time-based mechanism is clumsy but a better option is not obvious. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Acked-by: Rik van Riel Cc: Richard Davies Cc: Shaohua Li Cc: Avi Kivity Acked-by: Rafael Aquini Cc: Fengguang Wu Cc: Michal Nazarewicz Cc: Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz Cc: Kyungmin Park Cc: Mark Brown Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds ©Çº