Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 15:01:25 -0600
From: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
To: Andreas Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: Denis Vlasenko <vda@ilport.com.ua>, Eric Dumazet <dada1@cosmosbay.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [POLL] SLAB : Are the 32 and 192 bytes caches really usefull on x86_64 machines ?
Message-ID: <20051228210124.GB1639@waste.org>
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On Wed, Dec 28, 2005 at 06:57:15PM +0100, Andreas Kleen wrote:
> Am Mi 28.12.2005 09:54 schrieb Denis Vlasenko <vda@ilport.com.ua>:
> 
> > > # grep "size-" /proc/slabinfo |grep -v DMA|cut -c1-40
> > > size-131072 0 0 131072
> > > size-65536 0 0 65536
> > > size-32768 1 1 32768
> > > size-16384 0 0 16384
> > > size-8192 253 253 8192
> > > size-4096 89 89 4096
> > > size-2048 248 248 2048
> > > size-1024 312 312 1024
> > > size-512 545 648 512
> > > size-256 213 270 256
> > > size-128 5642 5642 128
> > > size-64 1025 1586 64
> > > size-32 2262 7854 32
> >
> > Wow... I overlooked that you are requesting data from x86_64 boxes.
> > Mine is not, it's i386...
> 
> This whole discussion is pointless anyways because most kmallocs are
> constant
> sized and with a constant sized kmalloc the slab is selected at compile
> time.
> 
> What would be more interesting would be to redo the complete kmalloc
> slab list.
> 
> I remember the original slab paper from Bonwick actually mentioned that
> power of
> two slabs are the worst choice for a malloc - but for some reason Linux
> chose them
> anyways. That would require a lot of measurements in different workloads
> on the
> actual kmalloc sizes and then select a good list, but could ultimately
> safe
> a lot of memory (ok not that much anymore because the memory intensive
> allocations should all have their own caches, but at least some)
> 
> Most likely the best list is different for 32bit and 64bit too.
> 
> Note that just looking at slabinfo is not enough for this - you need the
> original
> sizes as passed to kmalloc, not the rounded values reported there.
> Should be probably not too hard to hack a simple monitoring script up
> for that
> in systemtap to generate the data.

Something like this:

http://lwn.net/Articles/124374/

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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