• Dipankar Sarma's avatar
    [PATCH] fix file counting · 529bf6be
    Dipankar Sarma authored
    I have benchmarked this on an x86_64 NUMA system and see no significant
    performance difference on kernbench.  Tested on both x86_64 and powerpc.
    
    The way we do file struct accounting is not very suitable for batched
    freeing.  For scalability reasons, file accounting was
    constructor/destructor based.  This meant that nr_files was decremented
    only when the object was removed from the slab cache.  This is susceptible
    to slab fragmentation.  With RCU based file structure, consequent batched
    freeing and a test program like Serge's, we just speed this up and end up
    with a very fragmented slab -
    
    llm22:~ # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr
    587730  0       758844
    
    At the same time, I see only a 2000+ objects in filp cache.  The following
    patch I fixes this problem.
    
    This patch changes the file counting by removing the filp_count_lock.
    Instead we use a separate percpu counter, nr_files, for now and all
    accesses to it are through get_nr_files() api.  In the sysctl handler for
    nr_files, we populate files_stat.nr_files before returning to user.
    
    Counting files as an when they are created and destroyed (as opposed to
    inside slab) allows us to correctly count open files with RCU.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDipankar Sarma <dipankar@in.ibm.com>
    Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com>
    Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    529bf6be
fs.h 65.8 KB