Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2007 14:31:24 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <20071005.143124.74549703.davem@davemloft.net>
To: a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl
Cc: cebbert@redhat.com, willy@linux.intel.com, clameter@sgi.com,
       nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au, hch@lst.de, mel@skynet.ie,
       linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       dgc@sgi.com, jens.axboe@oracle.com, suresh.b.siddha@intel.com
Subject: Re: SLUB performance regression vs SLAB
From: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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	<1191616320.5838.26.camel@lappy>
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From: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:32:00 +0200

> Focus on the slab allocator usage, instrument it, record a trace,
> generate a statistical model that matches, and write a small
> programm/kernel module that has the same allocation pattern. Then verify
> this statistical workload still shows the same performance difference.
> 
> Easy: no
> Doable: yes

The other important bit is likely to generate a lot of DMA traffic
such that the L2 cache bandwidth is getting used on the bus
side by the PCI controller doing invalidations of both dirty
and clean L2 cache lines as devices DMA to/from them.

This will also be exercising the memory controller, further contending
with the cpu when SLAB touches cold data structures.
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