Re: more dput lock contentions in 2.6.38-rc?

[Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>]

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 09:04 +0800, Nick Piggin wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > we are testing dbench benchmark and see big drop of 2.6.38-rc compared
> > to 2.6.37 in several machines with 2 sockets or 4 sockets. We have 12
> > disks mount to /mnt/stp/dbenchdata/sd*/ and dbench runs against data of
> > the disks. According to perf, we saw more lock contentions:
> > In 2.6.37: 13.00%        dbench  [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] _raw_spin_lock
> > In 2.6.38-rc: 69.45%        dbench  [kernel.kallsyms]   [k]_raw_spin_lock
> > -     69.45%        dbench  [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] _raw_spin_lock
> >   - _raw_spin_lock
> >      - 48.41% dput
> >         - 61.17% path_put
> >            - 60.47% do_path_lookup
> >               + 53.18% user_path_at
> >               + 42.13% do_filp_open
> >               + 4.69% user_path_parent
> 
> What filesystems are mounted on the path?
ext3 or ext4

> >            - 35.56% d_path
> >                 seq_path
> >                 show_vfsmnt
> >                 seq_read
> >                 vfs_read
> >                 sys_read
> >                 system_call_fastpath
> >                 __GI___libc_read
> 
> This guy is from glibc's statvfs call that dbench uses. It
> parses /proc/mounts for mount flags which is racy (and
> not a good idea to do with any frequency).
> 
> A patch went into the kernel that allows glibc to get the
> flags directly. Not sure about glibc status, I imagine it
> will get there in another decade or two... Can you try
> commenting it out of dbench source code?
Sure, maybe after Chinese new year holiday, sorry.