The following two patches remove searching in the page allocator fast-path
by maintaining multiple free-lists in the per-cpu structure. At the time
the search was introduced, increasing the per-cpu structures would waste a
lot of memory as per-cpu structures were statically allocated at
compile-time. This is no longer the case.
The patches are as follows. They are based on mmotm-2009-08-27.
Patch 1 adds multiple lists to struct per_cpu_pages, one per
migratetype that can be stored on the PCP lists.
Patch 2 notes that the pcpu drain path check empty lists multiple times. The
patch reduces the number of checks by maintaining a count of free
lists encountered. Lists containing pages will then free multiple
pages in batch
The patches were tested with kernbench, netperf udp/tcp, hackbench and
sysbench. The netperf tests were not bound to any CPU in particular and
were run such that the results should be 99% confidence that the reported
results are within 1% of the estimated mean. sysbench was run with a
postgres background and read-only tests. Similar to netperf, it was run
multiple times so that it's 99% confidence results are within 1%. The
patches were tested on x86, x86-64 and ppc64 as
x86: Intel Pentium D 3GHz with 8G RAM (no-brand machine)
kernbench - No significant difference, variance well within noise
netperf-udp - 1.34% to 2.28% gain
netperf-tcp - 0.45% to 1.22% gain
hackbench - Small variances, very close to noise
sysbench - Very small gains
x86-64: AMD Phenom 9950 1.3GHz with 8G RAM (no-brand machine)
kernbench - No significant difference, variance well within noise
netperf-udp - 1.83% to 10.42% gains
netperf-tcp - No conclusive until buffer >= PAGE_SIZE
4096 +15.83%
8192 + 0.34% (not significant)
16384 + 1%
hackbench - Small gains, very close to noise
sysbench - 0.79% to 1.6% gain
ppc64: PPC970MP 2.5GHz with 10GB RAM (it's a terrasoft powerstation)
kernbench - No significant difference, variance well within noise
netperf-udp - 2-3% gain for almost all buffer sizes tested
netperf-tcp - losses on small buffers, gains on larger buffers
possibly indicates some bad caching effect.
hackbench - No significant difference
sysbench - 2-4% gain
This patch:
Currently the per-cpu page allocator searches the PCP list for pages of
the correct migrate-type to reduce the possibility of pages being
inappropriate placed from a fragmentation perspective. This search is
potentially expensive in a fast-path and undesirable. Splitting the
per-cpu list into multiple lists increases the size of a per-cpu structure
and this was potentially a major problem at the time the search was
introduced. These problem has been mitigated as now only the necessary
number of structures is allocated for the running system.
This patch replaces a list search in the per-cpu allocator with one list
per migrate type. The potential snag with this approach is when bulk
freeing pages. We round-robin free pages based on migrate type which has
little bearing on the cache hotness of the page and potentially checks
empty lists repeatedly in the event the majority of PCP pages are of one
type.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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