Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm/percpu.c: don't bother to re-walk the pcpu_slot list if nobody free space since we last drop pcpu_lock

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Sat Mar 29 2014 - 09:14:48 EST


On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 08:55:57PM +0800, Jianyu Zhan wrote:
> Quoted tj:
> >Hmmm... I'm not sure whether the added complexity is worthwhile. It's
> >a fairly cold path. Can you show how helpful this optimization is?
>
> The patch is quite less intrusive in the normal path
> and if we fall on the cold path, it means after satifying this allocation
> the chunk may be moved to lower slot, and the follow-up allocation
> of same or larger size(though rare) is likely to fail to cold path again. So
> this patch could be based on to do some heuristic later.

The above really doesn't show how helpful it is. This adds complexity
to optimize what seemingly is a quite cold path, which often is a
pretty bad idea as they tend to trade off readability and long term
maintainability for almost non-existing actual gain. If you think
this is a worthwhile optimization, please give justifications - use
scenarios, performance numbers and so on.

Thanks.

--
tejun
--
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/