Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] Make the batch size of the percpu_counter configurable

[Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>]

On Wed, 2013-05-29 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 22 May 2013 16:37:18 -0700 Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> 
> > Currently the per cpu counter's batch size for memory accounting is
> > configured as twice the number of cpus in the system.  However,
> > for system with very large memory, it is more appropriate to make it
> > proportional to the memory size per cpu in the system.
> > 
> > For example, for a x86_64 system with 64 cpus and 128 GB of memory,
> > the batch size is only 2*64 pages (0.5 MB).  So any memory accounting
> > changes of more than 0.5MB will overflow the per cpu counter into
> > the global counter.  Instead, for the new scheme, the batch size
> > is configured to be 0.4% of the memory/cpu = 8MB (128 GB/64 /256),
> > which is more inline with the memory size.
> 
> I renamed the patch to "mm: tune vm_committed_as percpu_counter
> batching size".
> 
> Do we have any performance testing results?  They're pretty important
> for a performance-improvement patch ;)
> 

I've done a repeated brk test of 800KB (from will-it-scale test suite)
with 80 concurrent processes on a 4 socket Westmere machine with a 
total of 40 cores.  Without the patch, about 80% of cpu is spent on
spin-lock contention within the vm_committed_as counter. With the patch,
there's a 73x speedup on the benchmark and the lock contention drops off
almost entirely.

Tim

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