Re: [PATCH 1/5] cpuset memory spread basic implementation

[Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>]

On Monday 06 February 2006 17:48, Christoph Lameter wrote:

> This is very different from the typical case of a single threaded process 
> roaming across some data and then terminating. In that case we always want 
> placement of memory as near to the process as possible. In cases were we 
> are not sure about future application behavior it is best to assume that 
> node local is best. Spreading memory allocations for storage that is only 
> accessed from one processor will reduce the performance of an application.
> 
> So the default operating mode needs to be node local.

I still don't quite agree. As long as the latency penalty of going
off node is not too bad (let's say < factor 2) i think it's better
to spread out the caches than to always locate them locally.
That is because kernel object/data cache accesses are far less frequent
than user mapped memory accesses. And it's a good idea to give
the later memory some headstart for local memory.

If you have a much worse worst case NUMA factor it might be different,
but even there it would be a good idea to at least spread it out
to nearby nodes.

-Andi