On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 07:54:38PM +0100, Tibor Bana wrote: > Greetings! > > I don't know if it still actual, but I am strugling with this problem right > now and searching the internet for solutions. > I read the thread and saw that you are strugling to reproduce the problem, > and I can reproduce it almost every day. > > - Install vmware player, and a linux guest. > - Configure the virtual machine to have a good amount of memory and cpu > - run resource intensive tasks on the guest > - when the host used up almost it's all memory and start to reuse caches > kcompactd will kick in. > > As I know the problem is related to transparent huge pages, but I tried to > disable it. > Today I saw the problem again and kcompactd shown an interesting status in > top. It hasn't used any memory, all zeroes but it used up one core > completely. > > My machine is a core-i7 with 4 physical cores and hyper threading and 24GB > Memory > 5.9.11-arch2-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat, 28 Nov 2020 02:07:22 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Another anecdote: 5.11.0, 64 gigs of ram. If I run QEMU/KVM for a VM with 16 gigs at the same time as a VMware VM with 16 gigs of ram, kcompact goes wild and both VMs get really slow. The key here is running KVM at the same time as VMware.
