Re: Large slab cache in 2.6.1

[Jamie Lokier]

Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> So it still seems likely to me that we'll blow away at least half of
> the dcache entries before we free any significant number of pages at
> all. That seems insane to me.

It's not totally insane to free dcache entries from pages that won't
be freed.  It encourages new entries to be allocated in those pages.

Ideally you'd simply mark those dcache entries as prime candidates for
recycling when new entries are needed, without actually freeing them
until new entries are needed - or until their whole pages can be
released.

Also, biasing new allocations to recycle those old dcache entries, but
also biasing them to recently used pages, so that recently used
entries tend to cluster in the same pages.

(I'm not sure how those ideas would work out in practice; they're just
hand-waving).

-- Jamie
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