Re: [PATCH 0/5] mm: support parallel free of memory

Andrew Morton
2017-03-01T02:36:18Z

On Fri, 24 Feb 2017 19:40:31 +0800 Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com> wrote:

> For regular processes, the time taken in its exit() path to free its
> used memory is not a problem. But there are heavy ones that consume
> several Terabytes memory and the time taken to free its memory could
> last more than ten minutes.
>
> To optimize this use case, a parallel free method is proposed here.
> For detailed explanation, please refer to patch 2/5.
>
> I'm not sure if we need patch 4/5 which can avoid page accumulation
> being interrupted in some case(patch description has more information).
> My test case, which only deal with anon memory doesn't get any help out
> of this of course. It can be safely dropped if it is deemed not useful.
>
> A test program that did a single malloc() of 320G memory is used to see
> how useful the proposed parallel free solution is, the time calculated
> is for the free() call. Test machine is a Haswell EX which has
> 4nodes/72cores/144threads with 512G memory. All tests are done with THP
> disabled.
>
> kernel time
> v4.10 10.8s __2.8%
> this patch(with default setting) 5.795s __5.8%

Dumb question: why not do this in userspace, presumably as part of the
malloc() library? malloc knows where all the memory is and should be
able to kick off N threads to run around munmapping everything?