tree a3f44d01de629234d70ad6211b9fd73fd705a76c
parent 7e496299d4d2ad8083effed6c5a18313a919edc6
author Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> 1281399546 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1281411898 -0700

shmem: reduce pagefault lock contention

I'm running a shmem pagefault test case (see attached file) under a 64 CPU
system.  Profile shows shmem_inode_info->lock is heavily contented and
100% CPUs time are trying to get the lock.  In the pagefault (no swap)
case, shmem_getpage gets the lock twice, the last one is avoidable if we
prealloc a page so we could reduce one time of locking.  This is what
below patch does.

The result of the test case:
2.6.35-rc3: ~20s
2.6.35-rc3 + patch: ~12s
so this is 40% improvement.

One might argue if we could have better locking for shmem.  But even shmem
is lockless, the pagefault will soon have pagecache lock heavily contented
because shmem must add new page to pagecache.  So before we have better
locking for pagecache, improving shmem locking doesn't have too much
improvement.  I did a similar pagefault test against a ramfs file, the
test result is ~10.5s.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment, clean up code layout, elimintate code duplication]
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: "Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin.zhang@intel.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>