Re: 2.6.13-mm3

Sonny Rao
2005-09-12T20:13:27Z

On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 12:56:41PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Sonny Rao <sonny@burdell.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 02:43:50AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > <snip>
> > > - There are several performance tuning patches here which need careful
> > > attention and testing. (Does anyone do performance testing any more?)
> > <snip>
> > >
> > > - The size of the page allocator per-cpu magazines has been increased
> > >
> > > - The page allocator has been changed to use higher-order allocations
> > > when batch-loading the per-cpu magazines. This is intended to give
> > > improved cache colouring effects however it might have the downside of
> > > causing extra page allocator fragmentation.
> > >
> > > - The page allocator's per-cpu magazines have had their lower threshold
> > > set to zero. And we can't remember why it ever had a lower threshold.
> > >
> >
> > What would you like? The usual suspects: SDET, dbench, kernbench ?
> >
>
> That would be a good start, thanks. The higher-order-allocations thing is
> mainly targeted at big-iron numerical computing I believe.

I assume you're referring to allocating huge pages? I'm not sure how
one would test this other than allocating N huge pages, releasing,
runing something intensive (like SDET), and then trying to allocate
N huge pages again? Or am I off base here?

Sonny