Hello,
I'm debugging a performance regression between 3.2 and 3.10 and I
narrowed it down to this patch
commit bfcfaa77bdf0f775263e906015982a608df01c76
vfs: use 'unsigned long' accesses for dcache name comparison and hashing
The test case is essentially
for (i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
mkdir("a$i");
On xfs on a fio card this goes at about 20k dir/sec with 3.2, and 12k
dir/sec with 3.10. This is because we spend waaaaay more time in
__d_lookup on 3.10 than in 3.2. The new hashing function for strings is
suboptimal for < sizeof(unsigned long) string names (and hell even >
sizeof(unsigned long) string names that I've tested). I broke out the
old hashing function and the new one into a userspace helper to get real
numbers and this is what I'm getting
Old hash table had 1000000 entries, 0 dupes, 0 max dupes
New hash table had 12628 entries, 987372 dupes, 900 max dupes
We had 11400 buckets with a p50 of 30 dupes, p90 of 240 dupes, p99 of
567 dupes for the new hash
My test does the hash, and then does the d_hash into a integer pointer
array the same size as the dentry hash table on my system, and then just
increments the value at the address we got to see how many entries we
overlap with. As you can see the old hash function ended up with all 1
million entries in their own bucket, whereas the new one they are only
distributed among ~12.5k buckets, which is why we're using so much more
CPU in __d_lookup.
The new hash function basically just uses the unsigned long value of the
string if it is less than unsigned long as the hash. If the string is
longer than unsigned long we still only hash the parts that fill a full
word, and then simply add the remaining bit to the hash. This seems to
make strings that are close together create hashes that are close
together as well, which when coupled with d_hash end up getting put into
existing buckets.
So the question is what do we do here? I tested other random strings
and every one of them ended up worse as far as collisions go with the
new function vs the old one. I assume we want to keep the word at a
time functionality, so should we switch to a different hashing scheme,
like murmur3/fnv/xxhash/crc32c/whatever? Or should we just go back to
what we had and maybe just use the word at a time stuff for comparisons?
Thanks,
Josef
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