Re: [PATCH RFC] slub: reap free slabs periodically

From: Vladimir Davydov
Date: Tue Jun 14 2016 - 04:28:33 EST


On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 04:32:26PM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> One reason for SLUBs creation was the 2 second scans in SLAB which causes
> significant disruption of latency sensitive tasksk.

That's not good, indeed.

>
> You can simply implement a reaper in userspace by running
>
> slabinfo -s
>
> if you have to have this.

Doing this periodically would probably hurt performance of active caches
as 'slabinfo -s' shrinks all slabs unconditionally, even if they are
being actively used. OTOH, one could trigger shrinking slabs only on
memory pressure. That would require yet another daemon tracking the
system state, but it is doable I guess.

Thanks a lot for your input, Christoph.

>
> There is no need to duplicate SLAB problems.