Re: [PATCH v4 resend] mm/slab: Improve performance of gathering slabinfo stats

[Aruna Ramakrishna]

On 08/29/2016 05:44 PM, Aruna Ramakrishna wrote:
> On large systems, when some slab caches grow to millions of objects (and
> many gigabytes), running 'cat /proc/slabinfo' can take up to 1-2 seconds.
> During this time, interrupts are disabled while walking the slab lists
> (slabs_full, slabs_partial, and slabs_free) for each node, and this
> sometimes causes timeouts in other drivers (for instance, Infiniband).
>
> This patch optimizes 'cat /proc/slabinfo' by maintaining a counter for
> total number of allocated slabs per node, per cache. This counter is
> updated when a slab is created or destroyed. This enables us to skip
> traversing the slabs_full list while gathering slabinfo statistics, and
> since slabs_full tends to be the biggest list when the cache is large, it
> results in a dramatic performance improvement. Getting slabinfo statistics
> now only requires walking the slabs_free and slabs_partial lists, and
> those lists are usually much smaller than slabs_full. We tested this after
> growing the dentry cache to 70GB, and the performance improved from 2s to
> 5ms.
>
> Signed-off-by: Aruna Ramakrishna <aruna.ramakrishna@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@xxxxxxx>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> Note: this has been tested only on x86_64.

This patch has spawned off a very interesting discussion in a older 
thread, and I guess the latest incarnation of this patch got buried. I'm 
resending it for review/approval.

Thanks,
Aruna