I have benchmarked this on an x86_64 NUMA system and see no significant
performance difference on kernbench. Tested on both x86_64 and powerpc.
The way we do file struct accounting is not very suitable for batched
freeing. For scalability reasons, file accounting was
constructor/destructor based. This meant that nr_files was decremented
only when the object was removed from the slab cache. This is susceptible
to slab fragmentation. With RCU based file structure, consequent batched
freeing and a test program like Serge's, we just speed this up and end up
with a very fragmented slab -
llm22:~ # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr
587730 0 758844
At the same time, I see only a 2000+ objects in filp cache. The following
patch I fixes this problem.
This patch changes the file counting by removing the filp_count_lock.
Instead we use a separate percpu counter, nr_files, for now and all
accesses to it are through get_nr_files() api. In the sysctl handler for
nr_files, we populate files_stat.nr_files before returning to user.
Counting files as an when they are created and destroyed (as opposed to
inside slab) allows us to correctly count open files with RCU.
Signed-off-by: Dipankar Sarma <dipankar@in.ibm.com>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Dipankar Sarma
529bf6be5c