tree 39aa137d63777fd345f5946f7b1662a6ed78dfda
parent 231367fd9bccbb36309ab5bf5012e11a84231031
author Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> 1217917727 +0300
committer Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> 1217917727 +0300

SLUB: dynamic per-cache MIN_PARTIAL

This patch changes the static MIN_PARTIAL to a dynamic per-cache ->min_partial
value that is calculated from object size. The bigger the object size, the more
pages we keep on the partial list.

I tested SLAB, SLUB, and SLUB with this patch on Jens Axboe's 'netio' example
script of the fio benchmarking tool. The script stresses the networking
subsystem which should also give a fairly good beating of kmalloc() et al.

To run the test yourself, first clone the fio repository:

  git clone git://git.kernel.dk/fio.git

and then run the following command n times on your machine:

  time ./fio examples/netio

The results on my 2-way 64-bit x86 machine are as follows:

  [ the minimum, maximum, and average are captured from 50 individual runs ]

                 real time (seconds)
                 min      max      avg      sd
  SLAB           22.76    23.38    22.98    0.17
  SLUB           22.80    25.78    23.46    0.72
  SLUB (dynamic) 22.74    23.54    23.00    0.20

                 sys time (seconds)
                 min      max      avg      sd
  SLAB           6.90     8.28     7.70     0.28
  SLUB           7.42     16.95    8.89     2.28
  SLUB (dynamic) 7.17     8.64     7.73     0.29

                 user time (seconds)
                 min      max      avg      sd
  SLAB           36.89    38.11    37.50    0.29
  SLUB           30.85    37.99    37.06    1.67
  SLUB (dynamic) 36.75    38.07    37.59    0.32

As you can see from the above numbers, this patch brings SLUB to the same level
as SLAB for this particular workload fixing a ~2% regression. I'd expect this
change to help similar workloads that allocate a lot of objects that are close
to the size of a page.

Cc: Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>