Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 14:44:33 -0800
From: Ravikiran G Thirumalai <kiran@scalex86.org>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Cc: dada1@cosmosbay.com, davem@davemloft.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       shai@scalex86.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, pravins@calsoftinc.com
Subject: Re: [patch 3/4] net: Percpufy frequently used variables -- proto.sockets_allocated
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On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 12:16:02PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Ravikiran G Thirumalai <kiran@scalex86.org> wrote:
> >
> > which can be assumed as not frequent.  
> > At sk_stream_mem_schedule(), read_sockets_allocated() is invoked only 
> > certain conditions, under memory pressure -- on a large CPU count machine, 
> > you'd have large memory, and I don't think read_sockets_allocated would get 
> > called often.  It did not atleast on our 8cpu/16G box.  So this should be OK 
> > I think.
> 
> That being said, the percpu_counters aren't a terribly successful concept
> and probably do need a revisit due to the high inaccuracy at high CPU
> counts.  It might be better to do some generic version of vm_acct_memory()
> instead.

AFAICS vm_acct_memory is no better.  The deviation on large cpu counts is the 
same as percpu_counters -- (NR_CPUS * NR_CPUS * 2) ...

> 
> If the benchmarks say that we need to.  If we cannot observe any problems
> in testing of existing code and if we can't demonstrate any benefit from
> the patched code then one option is to go off and do something else ;)

We first tried plain per-CPU counters for memory_allocated, found that reads
on memory_allocated was causing cacheline transfers, and then
switched over to batching.  So batching reads is useful.  To avoid
inaccuracy, we can maybe change percpu_counter_init to:

void percpu_counter_init(struct percpu_counter *fbc, int maxdev)

the percpu batching limit would then be maxdev/num_possible_cpus.  One would
use batching counters only when both reads and writes are frequent.  With
the above scheme, we would go fetch cachelines from other cpus for read
often only on large cpu counts, which is not any worse than the global
counter alternative, but it would still be beneficial on smaller machines,
without sacrificing a pre-set deviation.  

Comments?

Thanks,
Kiran
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