Walter Hofmann wrote:
>
> On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, Ricky Beam wrote:
>
> >"bloat"? It's two lines of code in the process exit path. That adds, what,
> >four cpu cylces to process termination? That's not bloat. The price of
> >tracking process zombies in the kernel is far, far less than tracking it
> >in user land.
>
> It certainly is bloat.
>
> 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.
>
> OTOH, counting zombies can be easily done in user space. A monitoring
> tool doesn't need to do it more often than, say, once per minute. If it
> needs to scan all processes for other purposes as well then counting
> zombies is nearly free.
>
> Walter
>
I must say that I think calling the maintaining of the nzombies counter
"bloat" is exaggerating.
If I do a zombie count in userland every 5 minutes, the number of cycles
this is going to burn is tremendously larger than performing the count
inline in exit().
++Jos
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