Re: Lockless page cache test results

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Thu Apr 27 2006 - 01:28:56 EST


Andrew Morton wrote:

The top of the 4-client
vanilla run profile looks like this:

samples % symbol name
65328 47.8972 find_get_page

Basically the machine is fully pegged, about 7% idle time.


Most of the time an acquisition of tree_lock is associated with a disk
read, or a page-size memset, or a page-size memcpy. And often an
acquisition of tree_lock is associated with multiple pages, not just a
single page.

Still, most of the times it is acquired would be once per page for
read, write, nopage.

For read and write, often it will be a full page memcpy but even such
a memcpy operation can quickly become insignificant compared to tl
contention.

Anyway, whatever. What needs to be demonstrated are real world
improvements at the end of the day.


So although the graph looks good, I wouldn't view this as a super-strong
argument in favour of lockless pagecache.

No. Cool numbers though ;)

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

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