Re: 2.5.38-mm3

Dipankar Sarma
2002-09-28T05:41:03Z

On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 03:54:55PM -0700, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 10:44:24PM +0530, Dipankar Sarma wrote:
> > Not sure why it shows up more in -mm, but likely because -mm has
> > lot less contention on other locks like dcache_lock.
>
> Well, the profile I posted was an interactive UP workload, and it's
> fairly high there. Trimming cycles off this is good for everyone.

Oh, I was commenting on possible files_lock contention on mbligh's
NUMA-Q.

>
> Small SMP boxen (dual?) used similarly will probably see additional
> gains as the number of locked operations in fget() will be reduced.
> There's clearly no contention or cacheline bouncing in my workloads as
> none of them have tasks sharing file tables, nor is anything else
> messing with the cachelines.

I remember seeing fget() high up in specweb profiles. I suspect that
fget profile count is high because it just happens to get called very
often for most workloads (all file syscalls) and the atomic
operations (SMP) and the function call overhead just adds to the cost.
If possible, we should try inlining it too.

Thanks
--
Dipankar Sarma <dipankar@in.ibm.com> http://lse.sourceforge.net
Linux Technology Center, IBM Software Lab, Bangalore, India.