summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/dracut
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorBrian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>2011-11-01 16:56:48 -0700
committerBrian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>2011-11-03 10:19:21 -0700
commitae6ba3dbe618bb7dbc46f2a3fb54c58243835d6b (patch)
tree685ac79b11ac9b17218f826c60515625eb913226 /dracut
parent6a95d0b74c2951f0dc82361ea279f64a7349f060 (diff)
Improve meta data performance
Profiling the system during meta data intensive workloads such as creating/removing millions of files, revealed that the system was cpu bound. A large fraction of that cpu time was being spent waiting on the virtual address space spin lock. It turns out this was caused by certain heavily used kmem_caches being backed by virtual memory. By default a kmem_cache will dynamically determine the type of memory used based on the object size. For large objects virtual memory is usually preferable and for small object physical memory is a better choice. See the spl_slab_alloc() function for a longer discussion on this. However, there is a certain amount of gray area when defining a 'large' object. For the following caches it turns out they were just over the line: * dnode_cache * zio_cache * zio_link_cache * zio_buf_512_cache * zfs_data_buf_512_cache Now because we know there will be a lot of churn in these caches, and because we know the slabs will still be reasonably sized. We can safely request with the KMC_KMEM flag that the caches be backed with physical memory addresses. This entirely avoids the need to serialize on the virtual address space lock. As a bonus this also reduces our vmalloc usage which will be good for 32-bit kernels which have a very small virtual address space. It will also probably be good for interactive performance since unrelated processes could also block of this same global lock. Finally, we may see less cpu time being burned in the arc_reclaim and txg_sync_threads. Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov> Issue #258
Diffstat (limited to 'dracut')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions