[patch 19/19] Reduce the radix tree nodes to 64 slots

Andrew Morton (akpm@zip.com.au)
Sun, 16 Jun 2002 23:53:56 -0700


Reduce the radix tree nodes from 128 slots to 64.

- The main reason for this is that on 64-bit/4k page machines, the
slab allocator has decided that radix tree nodes will require an
order-1 allocation. Shrinking the nodes to 64 slots pulls that back
to an order-0 allocation.

- On x86 we get fifteen 64-slot nodes per page rather than seven
129-slot nodes, for a modest memory saving.

- Halving the node size will approximately halve the memory use in
the worrisome really-large, really-sparse file case.

Of course, the downside is longer tree walks. Each level of the tree
covers six bits of pagecache index rather than seven. As ever, I am
guided by Anton's profiling on the 12- and 32-way PPC boxes.
radix_tree_lookup() is currently down in the noise floor.

Now, there is one special case: one file which is really big and which
is accessed in a random manner and which is accessed very heavily: the
blockdev mapping. We _are_ showing some locking cost in
__find_get_block (used to be __get_hash_table) and in its call to
find_get_page(). I have a bunch of patches which introduce a generic
per-cpu buffer LRU, and which remove ext2's private bitmap buffer LRUs.
I expect these patches to wipe the blockdev mapping lookup lock contention
off the map, but I'm awaiting test results from Anton before deciding
whether those patches are worth submitting.

--- 2.5.22/lib/radix-tree.c~ratshrink Sun Jun 16 23:12:54 2002
+++ 2.5.22-akpm/lib/radix-tree.c Sun Jun 16 23:12:54 2002
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
/*
* Radix tree node definition.
*/
-#define RADIX_TREE_MAP_SHIFT 7
+#define RADIX_TREE_MAP_SHIFT 6
#define RADIX_TREE_MAP_SIZE (1UL << RADIX_TREE_MAP_SHIFT)
#define RADIX_TREE_MAP_MASK (RADIX_TREE_MAP_SIZE-1)

-
-
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