Re: [RFC] mm: Make vm_acct_memory scalable for large memory allocations

From: Andi Kleen
Date: Thu Jan 27 2011 - 19:15:38 EST



This seems like a pretty dumb test case. We have 64 cores sitting in a
loop "allocating" 32MB of memory, not actually using that memory and
then freeing it up again.

Any not-completely-insane application would actually _use_ the memory.
Which involves pagefaults, page allocations and much memory traffic
modifying the page contents.

Do we actually care?

It's a bit like a poorly tuned malloc. From what I heard poorly tuned mallocs are quite
common in the field, also with lots of custom ones around.

While it would be good to tune them better the kernel should also have reasonable performance
for this case.

The poorly tuned malloc has other problems too, but this addresses at least one
of them.

Also I think Tim's patch is a general improvement to a somewhat dumb code path.

-Andi

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