[PATCH v2 0/7] lib/lzo: performance improvements

[Dave Rodgman]

This patch series introduces performance improvements for lzo.

The previous version of this patchset is here:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/11/21/625

This version tidies up the ifdefs as per Christoph's comment (although
certainly more could be done, this is at least a bit more consistent
with normal kernel coding style).

On 23/11/2018 2:12 am, Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:

>> The graph below shows the weighted round-trip throughput of lzo, lz4 and
>> lzo-rle, for randomly generated 4k chunks of data with varying levels of
>> entropy. (To calculate weighted round-trip throughput, compression performance
>> is emphasised to reflect the fact that zram does around 2.25x more compression
>> than decompression.
> 
> Right. The number is data dependent. Not all swapped out pages can be
> compressed; compressed pages that end up being >= zs_huge_class_size() are
> considered incompressible and stored as it.
> 
> I'd say that on my setups around 50-60% of pages are incompressible.

So, just to give a bit more detail: the test setup was a Samsung
Chromebook Pro, cycling through 80 tabs in Chrome. With lzo-rle, only
5% of pages increased in size, and 90% of pages compress to 75% of
original size (or better). Mean compression ratio was 41%. Importantly
for lzo-rle, there are a lot of low-entropy pages where it can do well:
in total about 20% of the data is zeros forming part of a run of 4 or
more bytes.

As a quick summary of the impact of these patches on bigger chunks of
data, I've compared the performance of four different variants of lzo
on two large (~40 MB) files. The numbers show round-trip throughput
in MB/s:

Variant         | Low-entropy | High-entropy
Current lzo     |  242        | 157
Arm opts        |  290        | 159
RLE             |  876        | 151
Arm opts + RLE  | 1150        | 181

So both the Arm optimisations (8,16-byte copy & CTZ patches), and the
RLE implementation make a significant contribution to the overall
performance uplift.