On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 03:48:46PM +1000, Lachlan McIlroy wrote:
The size of a single ktrace entry is 16 pointers so 128 bytes. For the case
of XFS_RW_KTRACE_SIZE which is 128 entries this equates to 16KB and on a system
with 4KB pages that is under memory pressure this can stall that process for a
significant time while it hunts for 4 free pages. Cutting this value back to
32 means it will only need one page.
That will effectively render that type of tracing useless - 32
entries is not enough history to capture enough
read/write/map/invalidate trace events to be meaningful. In the past
I've often had to increase this to 256 or 512 entries to be able to
capture the events necessary to debug problems...