On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 8:32 AM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 3:01 AM, Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Looks like this is now 10x faster: ~2.66Mloops (debug) VS. >> ~26.60Mloops (no-debug). > > Ok, that's getting to be in the right ballpark. So I installed my new i7-4770S yesterday - somewhat lower frequency than my previous CPU, but it has four cores plus HT, and boy does that show the scalability problems better. My test-program used to get maybe 15% time in spinlock. On the 4770S, with current -git (so no lockref) I get this: [torvalds@i5 test-lookup]$ for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do ./a.out ; done Total loops: 26656873 Total loops: 26701572 Total loops: 26698526 Total loops: 26752993 Total loops: 26710556 with a profile that looks roughly like: 84.14% a.out _raw_spin_lock 3.04% a.out lg_local_lock 2.16% a.out vfs_getattr 1.16% a.out dput.part.15 0.67% a.out copy_user_enhanced_fast_string 0.55% a.out complete_walk [ Side note: Al, that lg_local_lock really is annoying: it's br_read_lock(mntput_no_expire), with two thirds of the calls coming from mntput_no_expire, and the rest from path_init -> lock_rcu_walk. I really really wonder if we could get rid of the br_read_lock(&vfsmount_lock) for rcu_walk_init(), and use just the RCU read accesses for the mount-namespaces too. What is that lock really protecting against during lookup anyway? ] With the last lockref patch I sent out, it looks like this: [torvalds@i5 test-lookup]$ for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do ./a.out ; done Total loops: 54740529 Total loops: 54568346 Total loops: 54715686 Total loops: 54715854 Total loops: 54790592 28.55% a.out lockref_get_or_lock 20.65% a.out lockref_put_or_lock 9.06% a.out dput 6.37% a.out lg_local_lock 5.45% a.out lookup_fast 3.77% a.out d_rcu_to_refcount 2.03% a.out vfs_getattr 1.75% a.out copy_user_enhanced_fast_string 1.16% a.out link_path_walk 1.15% a.out avc_has_perm_noaudit 1.14% a.out __lookup_mnt so performance more than doubled (on that admittedly stupid benchmark), and you can see that the cacheline bouncing for that reference count is still a big deal, but at least it gets some real work done now because we're not spinning waiting for it. So you can see the bad case with even just a single socket when the benchmark is just targeted enough. But two cores just wasn't enough to show any performance advantage. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html