When a PCP is mostly used for frees then high-order pages can exist on PCP lists for some time. This is problematic when the allocation pattern is all allocations from one CPU and all frees from another resulting in colder pages being used. When bulk freeing pages, limit the number of high-order pages that are stored on the PCP lists. Netperf running on localhost exhibits this pattern and while it does not matter for some machines, it does matter for others with smaller caches where cache misses cause problems due to reduced page reuse. Pages freed directly to the buddy list may be reused quickly while still cache hot where as storing on the PCP lists may be cold by the time free_pcppages_bulk() is called. Using perf kmem:mm_page_alloc, the 5 most used page frames were 5.17-rc3 13041 pfn=0x111a30 13081 pfn=0x5814d0 13097 pfn=0x108258 13121 pfn=0x689598 13128 pfn=0x5814d8 5.17-revert-highpcp 192009 pfn=0x54c140 195426 pfn=0x1081d0 200908 pfn=0x61c808 243515 pfn=0xa9dc20 402523 pfn=0x222bb8 5.17-full-series 142693 pfn=0x346208 162227 pfn=0x13bf08 166413 pfn=0x2711e0 166950 pfn=0x2702f8 The spread is wider as there is still time before pages freed to one PCP get released with a tradeoff between fast reuse and reduced zone lock acquisition.
