diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt index 96f0ee825bed..84eb25cd69aa 100644 --- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt +++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt @@ -574,16 +574,24 @@ of physical RAM. See above. page-cluster -page-cluster controls the number of pages which are written to swap in -a single attempt. The swap I/O size. +page-cluster controls the number of pages up to which consecutive pages +are read in from swap in a single attempt. This is the swap counterpart +to page cache readahead. +The mentioned consecutivity is not in terms of virtual/physical addresses, +but consecutive on swap space - that means they were swapped out together. It is a logarithmic value - setting it to zero means "1 page", setting it to 1 means "2 pages", setting it to 2 means "4 pages", etc. +Zero disables swap readahead completely. The default value is three (eight pages at a time). There may be some small benefits in tuning this to a different value if your workload is swap-intensive. +Lower values mean lower latencies for initial faults, but at the same time +extra faults and I/O delays for following faults if they would have been part of +that consecutive pages readahead would have brought in. + ============================================================= panic_on_oom