Re: init's children list is long and slows reaping children.

Jeff Garzik
2007-04-06T22:39:00Z

Robin Holt wrote:
> We have been testing a new larger configuration and we are seeing a very
> large scan time of init's tsk->children list. In the cases we are seeing,
> there are numerous kernel processes created for each cpu (ie: events/0
> ... events/ , xfslogd/0 ... xfslogd/ ). These are
> all on the list ahead of the processes we are currently trying to reap.

What about attacking the explosion of kernel threads?

As CPU counts increase, the number of per-CPU kernel threads gets really
ridiculous.

I would rather change the implementation under the hood to start per-CPU
threads on demand, similar to a thread-pool implementation.

Boxes with $BigNum CPUs probably won't ever use half of those threads.

Jeff