Re: [reiserfs-dev] Re: Note describing poor dcache utilization under high memory pressure

From: Hans Reiser (reiser@namesys.com)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 05:46:43 EST


Alexander Viro wrote:

>
>On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Hans Reiser wrote:
>
>>This fails to recover an object (e.g. dcache entry) which is used once,
>>and then spends a year in cache on the same page as an object which is
>>hot all the time. This means that the hot set of objects becomes
>>diffused over an order of magnitude more pages than if garbage
>>collection squeezes them all together. That makes for very poor caching.
>>
>
>Any GC that is going to move active dentries around is out of question.
>It would need a locking of such strength that you would be the first
>to cry bloody murder - about 5 seconds after you look at the scalability
>benchmarks.
>
>

I don't mean to suggest that the dentry cache locking is an easy problem
to solve, but the problem discussed is a real one, and it is sufficient
to illustrate that the unified cache is fundamentally flawed as an
algorithm compared to using subcache plugins.

Hans

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