Re: Mainline kernel OLTP performance update

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Pekka Enberg wrote:

Looking at __slab_free(), unless page->inuse is constantly zero and we
discard the slab, it really is just cache effects (10% sounds like a
lot, though!). AFAICT, the only way to optimize that is with Christoph's
unfinished pointer freelists patches or with a remote free list like in
SLQB.

No there is another way. Increase the allocator order to 3 for the
kmalloc-8192 slab then multiple 8k blocks can be allocated from one of the
larger chunks of data gotten from the page allocator. That will allow slub
to do fast allocs.