Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Support multiple pages allocation

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Thu Jul 04 2013 - 06:00:57 EST


On Thu 04-07-13 13:24:50, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 04, 2013 at 12:01:43AM +0800, Zhang Yanfei wrote:
> > On 07/03/2013 11:51 PM, Zhang Yanfei wrote:
> > > On 07/03/2013 11:28 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > >> On Wed 03-07-13 17:34:15, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> > >> [...]
> > >>> For one page allocation at once, this patchset makes allocator slower than
> > >>> before (-5%).
> > >>
> > >> Slowing down the most used path is a no-go. Where does this slow down
> > >> come from?
> > >
> > > I guess, it might be: for one page allocation at once, comparing to the original
> > > code, this patch adds two parameters nr_pages and pages and will do extra checks
> > > for the parameter nr_pages in the allocation path.
> > >
> >
> > If so, adding a separate path for the multiple allocations seems better.
>
> Hello, all.
>
> I modify the code for optimizing one page allocation via likely macro.
> I attach a new one at the end of this mail.
>
> In this case, performance degradation for one page allocation at once is -2.5%.
> I guess, remained overhead comes from two added parameters.
> Is it unreasonable cost to support this new feature?

Which benchmark you are using for this testing?

> I think that readahead path is one of the most used path, so this penalty looks
> endurable. And after supporting this feature, we can find more use cases.

What about page faults? I would oppose that page faults are _much_ more
frequent than read ahead so you really cannot slow them down.

[...]
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/