Re: [RFC] memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup

Andrew Morton
2006-10-09T18:12:03Z

On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 03:54:57 -0700
Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> wrote:

> Optimize the critical zonelist scanning for free pages in the kernel
> memory allocator by caching the zones that were found to be full
> recently, and skipping them.

This doesn't exactly simplify the kernel, but the benchmark numbers
are nice.

I worry about the one-second-expiry thing. Wall time is a pretty
meaningless thing in the context of the page allocator and it doesn't seem
appropriate to use it. A more appropriate measure of "time" in this
context would be number-of-pages-allocated.