Re: [RFC/PATCH] Optimize zone allocator synchronization

[Don Porter <porterde@cs.utexas.edu>]

Thank you all for your consideration and insightful responses to my
posting.  I apologize for not responding sooner---I have been under a
deadline.

It seems clear that further investigation will be needed to understand
these performance numbers better.

To summarize, I understand that the following experiments will be helpful:

1) Instrument the allocation code to determine the common size/order
of the allocations for these workloads.

2) Try to integrate these changes with ticket spinlocks

3) Try placing the zone lock in its own cacheline

4) Look for single-threaded regressions (dd benchmark).

I'll do these at my first opportunity, hopefully within the next week.
Please let me know if I misunderstood any of your comments.

My intuition about the cost of ping-ponging the lock's cache line
certainly matched yours, so I was very surprised to see these
performance numbers.  

On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 04:31:59PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> It's funny, Dave Miller and I were just talking about the possible
> reappearance of zone->lock contention with massively multi core and
> multi threaded CPUs. I think the right way to fix this in the long run
> if it turns into a real problem, is something like having a lock per
> MAX_ORDER block, and having CPUs prefer to allocate from different
> blocks. Anti-frag makes this pretty interesting to implement, but it
> will be possible.

As a bit of background, the zone lock is indeed one of the more
contended locks in my target workloads so it was no accident that I
was looking for ways to improve its scalability.  I am quite
interested in Nick's ideas about how to split up the zone allocator's
synchronization.

Of course, these contention levels may not meet your definition of
"real problem" (~.1% of the execution time).

Best regards,
Don
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