Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] mm, page_owner: Add page_owner_stacks file to print out only stacks and their counter

[Marco Elver]

On Thu, 8 Sept 2022 at 05:32, Oscar Salvador <osalvador@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 07, 2022 at 09:14:35AM +0200, Marco Elver wrote:
> > Why are you casting a stack_record** to a stack_record*? stack_table
> > is already appropriately typed, and there should be no need to cast
> > things around.
> >
> > 'stacks' is supposed to be the bucket? In which case you need to
> > dereference it to get the first entry in the bucket: bucket =
> > stack_table[table_i];
> >
> > stack_i cannot be used to index into the bucket, because the elements
> > in it are a linked list and not necessarily adjacent in memory. You
> > have to traverse the linked list stack_i elements to get to the start:
>
> Yea, I figured that much after thinking about more, but I was overly
> eager.
>
> >   for (int i = 0; stack && i < stack_i; stack = stack->next, ++i);
>
> But this seems suboptimal.
> With this code, we have to walk the list till we find the right index
> every time we enter the function, while the actual code of v2
> or even the patch from v1 [1], we do not really need to do that
> because we already have the pointer to the stack.
>
> So I much rather prefer that, than having to traverse the stacks
> till the find the right one.

I would not prematurely optimize this. It's a hash map, and the only
problem is if there are tons of collisions. Also, this function isn't
performance critical, it's only used for printing, which itself is
slow.

I suggest you collect some stats how many entries each bucket has on
average. If the average is <10, I'd go with the cleaner interface.