Re: /proc/nzombies

From: Paul Menage (Paul.Menage@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 05:31:10 EST


In article <20000229011707.A9049@frodo.rrze.uni-erlangen.de>, you write:
>
>The process exit path is critical--it is called often and every cycle is
>important. Take a webserver: It can fork a process per request. Consider
>an SMP system: If you write to the same counter repeatedly with all CPUs
>you will get cache ping-pong effects which slow you down severely. All
>these things have to be considered.

So have a per-CPU (signed) zombie count, and a global zombie count.
When a process calls exit(), its current CPU increments its own zombie
count; when a process is reaped, the reaping CPU decrements its own
zombie count. Every so often, and whenever someone reads
/proc/nzombies, we pass over all the counts, doing
xchg(&cpu_nzombies[i].val, 0) and adding the returned values to the
global nzombies count.

Paul

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