[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Message-Id: <200803111507.20870.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:07:20 +1100
From: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
To: Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@...il.com>
Subject: Re: quicklists confuse meminfo
On Tuesday 11 March 2008 02:54, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > - They are pretty marginal from a performance POV (iirc)
>
> Pretty significant in our experience.
>
> > Making __GFP_ZERO smarter/more efficient would be a preferable way of
> > addressing any performance problems we have in there.
>
> Looking at the page allocator "fastpath": The basic reaons that this was
> such a good optimization was that the page allocator is expensive to call.
> The hotpath gets more and more clogged with logic. Fixing the page
> allocator to be more efficient may be the right approach here. That could
> also include having a list of zeroed pages.
This is insane. We add more and more of this NUMA and cpuset and anti-frag
and page zeroing logic to the page allocator, and then decide that we
don't actually need to obey any of those rules when we're running lat_proc.
You will never be able to make the page allocator faster than a single list
of pages. The reason is because we actually *want* some of these checks and
heuristics in the page allocator.
And I doubt a list of zeroed pages is the right approach. That's just
adding more complexity for lat_proc AFAIKS.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
Powered by blists - more mailing lists