Re: [PATCH 0/1] RFC: poll/select performance on datagram sockets

[Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>]

Le vendredi 29 octobre 2010 à 19:18 +0100, Alban Crequy a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> When a process calls the poll or select, the kernel calls (struct
> file_operations)->poll on every file descriptor and returns a mask of
> events which are ready. If the process is only interested by POLLIN
> events, the mask is still computed for POLLOUT and it can be expensive.
> For example, on Unix datagram sockets, a process running poll() with
> POLLIN will wakes-up when the remote end call read(). This is a
> performance regression introduced when fixing another bug by
> 3c73419c09a5ef73d56472dbfdade9e311496e9b and
> ec0d215f9420564fc8286dcf93d2d068bb53a07e.
> 
> The attached program illustrates the problem. It compares the
> performance of sending/receiving data on an Unix datagram socket and
> select(). When the datagram sockets are not connected, the performance
> problem is not triggered, but when they are connected it becomes a lot
> slower. On my computer, I have the following time:
> 
> Connected datagram sockets: >4 seconds
> Non-connected datagram sockets: <1 second
> 
> The patch attached in the next email fixes the performance problem: it
> becomes <1 second for both cases. I am not suggesting the patch for
> inclusion; I would like to change the prototype of (struct
> file_operations)->poll instead of adding ->poll2. But there is a lot of
> poll functions to change (grep tells me 337 functions).
> 
> Any opinions?

My opinion would be to use epoll() for this kind of workload.

Also, about unix_datagram_poll() being slow, it probably can be
addressed separately.