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).