Re: [PATCH] percpu_counter: Put a reasonable upper bound onpercpu_counter_batch

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Mon Sep 05 2011 - 23:49:14 EST


On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 09:46:09PM +1000, Anton Blanchard wrote:
>
> When testing on a 1024 thread ppc64 box I noticed a large amount of
> CPU time in ext4 code.
>
> ext4_has_free_blocks has a fast path to avoid summing every free and
> dirty block per cpu counter, but only if the global count shows more
> free blocks than the maximum amount that could be stored in all the
> per cpu counters.
>
> Since percpu_counter_batch scales with num_online_cpus() and the maximum
> amount in all per cpu counters is percpu_counter_batch * num_online_cpus(),
> this breakpoint grows at O(n^2).
>
> This issue will also hit with users of percpu_counter_compare which
> does a similar thing for one percpu counter.
>
> I chose to cap percpu_counter_batch at 1024 as a conservative first
> step, but we may want to reduce it further based on further benchmarking.
>
> Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@xxxxxxxxx>

Applied to percpu/for-3.2.

Thanks.

--
tejun
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