On Wed, 12 Oct 2011, Andrew Morton wrote: > > Note that this patch is simply to illustrate the gains that can be made here. > > What I'm looking for is some guidance on an acceptable way to accomplish the > > task of reducing contention in this area, either by caching these values in a > > way similar to the attached patch, or by some other mechanism if this is > > unacceptable. > > Yes, the global vm_stat[] array is a problem - I'm surprised it's hung > around for this long. Altering the sysctl_overcommit_memory mode will > hide the problem, but that's no good. The global vm_stat array is keeping the state for the zone. It would be even more expensive to calculate this at every point where we need such data. > I think we've discussed switching vm_stat[] to a contention-avoiding > counter scheme. Simply using <percpu_counter.h> would be the simplest > approach. They'll introduce inaccuracies but hopefully any problems > from that will be minor for the global page counters. We already have a contention avoiding scheme for counter updates in vmstat.c. The problem here is that vm_stat is frequently read. Updates from other cpus that fold counter updates in a deferred way into the global statistics cause cacheline eviction. The updates occur too frequent in this load. > otoh, I think we've been round this loop before and I don't recall why > nothing happened. The update behavior can be tuned using /proc/sys/vm/stat_interval. Increase the interval to reduce the folding into the global counter (set maybe to 10?). This will reduce contention. The other approach is to increase the allowed delta per zone if frequent updates occur via the overflow checks in vmstat.c. See calculate_*_threshold there. Note that the deltas are current reduced for memory pressure situations (after recent patches by Mel). This will cause a significant increase in vm_stat cacheline contention compared to earlier kernels. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>