linux-kernel - Re: [RFC v1][PATCH]page_fault retry with NOPAGE

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Date:	Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:00:07 +0100
From:	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>
To:	Mike Waychison <mikew@...gle.com>
Cc:	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>, Ying Han <yinghan@...gle.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, akpm <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
	Rohit Seth <rohitseth@...gle.com>,
	Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, edwintorok@...il.com
Subject: Re: [RFC v1][PATCH]page_fault retry with NOPAGE_RETRY

On Thu, 2008-11-27 at 01:28 -0800, Mike Waychison wrote:

> Correct.  I don't recall the numbers from the pathelogical cases we were 
> seeing, but iirc, it was on the order of 10s of seconds, likely 
> exascerbated by slower than usual disks.  I've been digging through my 
> inbox to find numbers without much success -- we've been using a variant 
> of this patch since 2.6.11.

> We generally try to avoid such things, but sometimes it a) can't be 
> easily avoided (third party libraries for instance) and b) when it hits 
> us, it affects the overall health of the machine/cluster (the monitoring 
> daemons get blocked, which isn't very healthy).

If its only monitoring, there might be another solution. If you can keep
the required data in a separate (approximate) copy so that you don't
need mmap_sem at all to show them.

If your mmap_sem is so contended your latencies are unacceptable, adding
more users to it - even statistics gathering, just isn't going to cure
the situation.

Furthermore, /proc code usually isn't written with performance in mind,
so its usually simple and robust code. Adding it to a 'hot'-path like
you're doing doesn't seem advisable.

Also, releasing and re-acquiring mmap_sem can significantly add to the
cacheline bouncing that thing already has.

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