This factor controls the level of reclaim when memory is being fragmented. It defines the percentage of the high watermark of a zone that will be reclaimed if pages of different mobility are being mixed within pageblocks. The intent is that compaction has less work to do in the future and to increase the success rate of future high-order allocations such as SLUB allocations, THP and hugetlbfs pages.
To make it sensible with respect to the watermark_scale_factor parameter, the unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of 15,000 means that up to 150% of the high watermark will be reclaimed in the event of a pageblock being mixed due to fragmentation. The level of reclaim is determined by the number of fragmentation events that occurred in the recent past. If this value is smaller than a pageblock then a pageblocks worth of pages will be reclaimed (e.g. 2MB on 64-bit x86). A boost factor of 0 will disable the feature.