Re: [RFC PATCH] mm: madvise: Ignore repeated MADV_DONTNEED hints

[Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2015 at 02:35:41PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Feb 2015 22:18:24 +0000 Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> wrote:
> 
> > > Is there something
> > > preventing this from being addressed within glibc?
> >  
> > I doubt it other than I expect they'll punt it back and blame either the
> > application for being stupid or the kernel for being slow.
> 
> *Is* the application being stupid?  What is it actually doing? 

Only a little. There is little simulated think time between the allocation
and the subsequent free. It means the cost of alloc/free dominates where
in "real" applications they would either be reusing buffers if they were
constantly needed or the think time would mask the cost of the free.

> Something like
> 
> pthread_routine()
> {
> 	p = malloc(X);
> 	do_some(work);
> 	free(p);
> 	return;
> }
> 

Pretty much. There is a search_mem() function that

alloc(copy_size)
memcpy
search
free(copy)

A real application might try and avoid the copy or reuse buffers if they
encountered this particular problem.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs

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