Hi David I am working on the SMP scalability problem of socket allocation / deallocation. I'll submit seven patches on lkml for fs subsystem, but before that, I would like to submit two network patches for net-next-2.6. After all contended cache lines access on fs subsystem are avoided, we hit two contention points on network side : socket_allocated and orphan_count atomic's (for SOCK_STREAM sockets) Thank you [PATCH] net: Use a percpu_counter for sockets_allocated Instead of using one atomic_t per protocol, use a percpu_counter for "sockets_allocated", to reduce cache line contention on heavy duty network servers. Note : We revert commit (248969ae31e1b3276fc4399d67ce29a5d81e6fd9 net: af_unix can make unix_nr_socks visbile in /proc), since it is not anymore used after sock_prot_inuse_add() addition Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet --- include/net/sctp/sctp.h | 1 + include/net/sock.h | 2 +- include/net/tcp.h | 2 +- net/core/sock.c | 10 +++++++--- net/ipv4/proc.c | 3 ++- net/ipv4/tcp.c | 8 ++++++-- net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c | 4 ++-- net/ipv6/tcp_ipv6.c | 2 +- net/sctp/protocol.c | 6 +++++- net/sctp/socket.c | 6 +++--- net/unix/af_unix.c | 1 - 11 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)