>
> Dimitri Sivanich <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > The IA/64 backtrace with all the cruft removed looks as follows:
> >
> > 0xa000000100149ac0 reap_timer_fnc+0x100
> > 0xa0000001000f4d70 run_timer_softirq+0x2d0
> > 0xa0000001000e9440 __do_softirq+0x200
> > 0xa0000001000e94e0 do_softirq+0x80
> > 0xa000000100017f50 ia64_handle_irq+0x190
> >
> > The system is running mostly AIM7, but I've seen holdoffs > 30 usec with
> > virtually no load on the system.
>
> They're pretty low latencies you're talking about there.
>
> You should be able to reduce the amount of work in that timer handler by
> limiting the size of the per-cpu caches in the slab allocator. You can do
> that by writing a magic incantation to /proc/slabinfo or:
>
> --- 25/mm/slab.c~a Mon May 24 14:51:32 2004
> +++ 25-akpm/mm/slab.c Mon May 24 14:51:37 2004
> @@ -2642,6 +2642,7 @@ static void enable_cpucache (kmem_cache_
> if (limit > 32)
> limit = 32;
> #endif
> + limit = 8;
I tried several values for this limit, but these had little effect.