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  • Shaohua Li's avatar
    shmem: reduce pagefault lock contention · ff36b801
    Shaohua Li authored
    
    
    I'm running a shmem pagefault test case (see attached file) under a 64 CPU
    system.  Profile shows shmem_inode_info->lock is heavily contented and
    100% CPUs time are trying to get the lock.  In the pagefault (no swap)
    case, shmem_getpage gets the lock twice, the last one is avoidable if we
    prealloc a page so we could reduce one time of locking.  This is what
    below patch does.
    
    The result of the test case:
    2.6.35-rc3: ~20s
    2.6.35-rc3 + patch: ~12s
    so this is 40% improvement.
    
    One might argue if we could have better locking for shmem.  But even shmem
    is lockless, the pagefault will soon have pagecache lock heavily contented
    because shmem must add new page to pagecache.  So before we have better
    locking for pagecache, improving shmem locking doesn't have too much
    improvement.  I did a similar pagefault test against a ramfs file, the
    test result is ~10.5s.
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment, clean up code layout, elimintate code duplication]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarShaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
    Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: "Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin.zhang@intel.com>
    Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    ff36b801