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authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>2009-09-21 17:03:19 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-09-22 07:17:39 -0700
commit5f8dcc21211a3d4e3a7a5ca366b469fb88117f61 (patch)
tree4bbb1b55c7787462fe313c7c003e77823c032422 /include/linux
parent5d863b89688e5811cd9e5bd0082cb38abe03adf3 (diff)
page-allocator: split per-cpu list into one-list-per-migrate-type
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>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/mmzone.h5
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h
index c188ea624c7..652ef01be58 100644
--- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
+++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
@@ -38,6 +38,7 @@
#define MIGRATE_UNMOVABLE 0
#define MIGRATE_RECLAIMABLE 1
#define MIGRATE_MOVABLE 2
+#define MIGRATE_PCPTYPES 3 /* the number of types on the pcp lists */
#define MIGRATE_RESERVE 3
#define MIGRATE_ISOLATE 4 /* can't allocate from here */
#define MIGRATE_TYPES 5
@@ -169,7 +170,9 @@ struct per_cpu_pages {
int count; /* number of pages in the list */
int high; /* high watermark, emptying needed */
int batch; /* chunk size for buddy add/remove */
- struct list_head list; /* the list of pages */
+
+ /* Lists of pages, one per migrate type stored on the pcp-lists */
+ struct list_head lists[MIGRATE_PCPTYPES];
};
struct per_cpu_pageset {