On Thu, 24 Aug 2017 10:55:53 +0200 Michal Hocko [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

If we assume that the number of VMAs is going to increase over time,
then doing anything we can do to reduce the overhead of each VMA
during PSS collection seems like the right way to go, and that means
outputting an aggregate statistic (to avoid whatever overhead there is
per line in writing smaps and in reading each line from userspace).

Also, Dan sent me some numbers from his benchmark measuring PSS on
system_server (the big Android process) using smaps vs smaps_rollup:

using smaps:
iterations:1000 pid:1163 pss:220023808
 0m29.46s real 0m08.28s user 0m20.98s system

using smaps_rollup:
iterations:1000 pid:1163 pss:220702720
 0m04.39s real 0m00.03s user 0m04.31s system

I would assume we would do all we can to reduce this kernel->user
overhead first before considering a new user visible file. I haven't
seen any attempts except from the low hanging fruid I have tried.

It's hard to believe that we'll get anything like a 5x speedup via
optimization of the existing code?