Re: Proposal: Use hi-res clock for file timestamps

Andi Kleen
2010-08-18T19:25:14Z

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 02:54:56PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 07:50:40PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > > - nfsd updates it whenever it reads an mtime out of an inode that matches
> > > current_fs_time to the granularity of 1/HZ.
> >
> > That means you have a very very hot cache line on a larger system
> > if there are a lot of mtime changes. Probably a bad idea.
>
> Only if those mtime changes are also followed immediately by nfsd reads
> of the mtime.

If multiple writers are changing the same location in quick succession
you have a hot cache line that gets bounced around. It doesn't need reads,
although reads make it even worse.

There's a lot of effort currently to make the VFS more parallel
and less synchronized and it would be bad again to regress here again.

-Andi
--
ak@linux.intel.com -- Speaking for myself only.