Man page 9 : balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited

balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited - balance dirty memory state

void balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited(struct address_space *  mapping );

mapping
    address_space which was dirtied

Processes which are dirtying memory should call in here once for each page which was newly dirtied. The function will periodically check the systemAqs dirty state and will initiate writeback if needed.

On really big machines, get_writeback_state is expensive, so try to avoid calling it too often (ratelimiting). But once weAqre over the dirty memory limit we decrease the ratelimiting by a lot, to prevent individual processes from overshooting the limit by (ratelimit_pages) each.