ons are more than common with SLUB. Try "grep -v '1 :' /proc/slabinfo" to get the list of high order slab caches. For example, the order-1 radix_tree_node slab cache may stall applications at swap-in time; the order-3 inode cache on most filesystems may stall applications when trying to read some file; the order-2 proc_inode_cache may stall applications when trying to open a /proc file. Secondly, once triggered, it will stall unrelated processes (not doing IO at all) in the system. This "one slow USB device stalls the whole system" avalanching effect is very bad. Thirdly, once stalled, the stall time could be intolerable long for the users. When there are 20MB queued writeback pages and USB 1.1 is writing them in 1MB/s, wait_on_page_writeback() will stuck for up to 20 seconds. Not to mention it may be called multiple times. So raise the bar to only enable PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC when priority goes below DEF_PRIORITY/3, or 6.25% LRU size. As the default dirty throttle ratio is 20%, it will hardly be triggered by pure dirty pages. We'd better treat PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC as some last resort workaround -- its stall time is so uncomfortably long (easily goes beyond 1s). The bar is only raised for (order < PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER) allocations, which are easy to satisfy in 1TB memory boxes. So, although 6.25% of memory could be an awful lot of pages to scan on a system with 1TB of memory, it won't really have to busy scan that much. Andreas tested an older version of this patch and reported that it mostly fixed his problem. Mel Gorman helped improve it and KOSAKI Motohiro will fix it further in the next patch. Reported-by: Andreas Mohr Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang Cc: Rik van Riel Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds