Re: [PATCH] lazy freeing of memory through MADV_FREE

Rik van Riel
2007-04-23T03:53:43Z

Nick Piggin wrote:
> Rik van Riel wrote:
>> Nick Piggin wrote:
>>
>>> Rik van Riel wrote:
>
>>>> Here are the transactions/seconds for each combination:

I've added a 5th column, with just your mmap_sem patch and
without my madv_free patch. It is run with the glibc patch,
which should make it fall back to MADV_DONTNEED after the
first MADV_FREE call fails.

>>>> vanilla new glibc madv_free kernel madv_free + mmap_sem mmap_sem
>>>> threads
>>>>
>>>> 1 610 609 596 545 534
>>>> 2 1032 1136 1196 1200 1180
>>>> 4 1070 1128 2014 2024 2027
>>>> 8 1000 1088 1665 2087 2089
>>>> 16 779 1073 1310 1999 2012

Not doing the mprotect calls is the big one I guess, especially
the fact that we don't need to take the mmap_sem for writing.

With both our patches, single and two thread performance with
MySQL sysbench is somewhat better than with just your patch,
4 and 8 thread performance are basically the same and just
your patch gives a slight benefit with 16 threads.

I guess I should benchmark up to 64 or 128 threads tomorrow,
to see if this is just luck or if the cache benefit of doing
the page faults and reusing hot pages is faster than not
having page faults at all.

I should run some benchmarks on other systems, too. Some of
these results could be an artifact of my quad core CPU. The
results could be very different on other systems...

> Yeah. That's funny, because it means either there is some
> contention on the mmap_sem (or ptl) at 1 thread, or that my
> patch alters the uncontended performance.

Maybe MySQL has various different threads to do
different tasks. Something to look into...