Re: page fault scalability patch V11 [0/7]: overview

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Fri Nov 19 2004 - 21:28:41 EST


William Lee Irwin III wrote:
On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 11:42:39AM -0800, Christoph Lameter wrote:

A. make_rss_atomic. The earlier releases contained that patch but
then another variable (such as anon_rss) was introduced that would
have required additional atomic operations. Atomic rss operations
are also causing slowdowns on machines with a high number of cpus
due to memory contention.
B. remove_rss. Replace rss with a periodic scan over the vm to
determine rss and additional numbers. This was also discussed on
linux-mm and linux-ia64. The scans while displaying /proc data
were undesirable.


Split counters easily resolve the issues with both these approaches
(and apparently your co-workers are suggesting it too, and have
performance results backing it).


Split counters still require atomic operations though. This is what
Christoph's latest effort is directed at removing. And they'll still
bounce cachelines around. (I assume we've reached the conclusion
that per-cpu split counters per-mm won't fly?).
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