Re: /proc reliability & performance

From: David Rees
Date: Fri Oct 17 2003 - 03:22:26 EST


On Thu, October 16, 2003 at 9:31 pm, Albert Cahalan sent the following
> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 23:24, Brian McGroarty wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 10:07:18PM -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>> > I created a process with 360 thousand threads,
>> > went into the /proc/*/task directory, and did
>> > a simple /bin/ls. It took over 9 minutes on a
>> > nice fast Opteron. (it's the same at top-level
>> > with processes, but I wasn't about to mess up
>> > my system that much)
>>
>> Are there many cases where the /proc directory
>> contents are read in this fashion?
>
> Sure. Run any of: top, ps, lsof, fuser...

I can vouch that with as few as a 3-5 hundred threads/processes started up
and not necessarily doing much, top starts using a good deal system time
on a somewhat aging dual PIII server on recent 2.4.x kernels.

-Dave
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