Re: [PATCH] mm: cache largest vma

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com> wrote:

> > Or is access to varied in the Oracle case that it's missing the cache 
> > all the time, because the rbtree causes many cachemisses as the 
> > separate nodes are accessed during an rb-walk?
> 
> Similar to get_cycles(), is there anyway to quickly measure the amount 
> of executed instructions? Getting the IPC for the mmap_cache (this of 
> course is constant) and the treewalk could give us a nice overview of 
> the function's cost. I was thinking of stealing some perf-stat 
> functionality for this but didn't get around to it. Hopefully there's an 
> easier way...

There's no such easy method I'm afraid (Frederic's probe based trigger 
facility will give us that and more - but it's not ready yet) - but you 
could try profiling the workload for significant cache-misses:

  perf record -e cache-misses ...

I _think_ if it's really catastrophic cache-misses then the rbtree walk 
should light up on the perf radar like crazy.

Thanks,

	Ingo