Thread (6 messages) 6 messages, 4 authors, 2003-08-18

Re: [RFC] prefault optimization

From: Martin J. Bligh <hidden>
Date: 2003-08-18 17:15:49

quoted
This patch attempts to reduce page fault overhead for mmap'd files.  All
pages in the page cache that will be managed by the current vma are
instantiated in the page table.
I believe this could punish applications which use large numbers of shared
libraries, especially if only a small portion of library code is used.
Take something like konqueror which maps over 30 shared libraries. With
prefaulting, all the libraries will be fully faulted even if only a tiny
portion of some library code is used.  This, potentially, could put a lot
of unwanted pages into the page cache which will be a kick in the pants
for low-memory systems.

For example, I don't have audio enabled at all in konqueror, but with this
patch, it will fault in 77K of data for libaudio that won't be used.

Just my 2c
The patch is designed to only prefault in pages which are already in the
pagecache, so it should be pretty cheap. I'd agree that faulting in all
the pages from disk would be too expensive.

M.

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