-
Hugh Dickins authored
update_mem_hiwater has attracted various criticisms, in particular from those concerned with mm scalability. Originally it was called whenever rss or total_vm got raised. Then many of those callsites were replaced by a timer tick call from account_system_time. Now Frank van Maarseveen reports that to be found inadequate. How about this? Works for Frank. Replace update_mem_hiwater, a poor combination of two unrelated ops, by macros update_hiwater_rss and update_hiwater_vm. Don't attempt to keep mm->hiwater_rss up to date at timer tick, nor every time we raise rss (usually by 1): those are hot paths. Do the opposite, update only when about to lower rss (usually by many), or just before final accounting in do_exit. Handle mm->hiwater_vm in the same way, though it's much less of an issue. Demand that whoever collects these hiwater statistics do the work of taking the maximum with rss or total_vm. And there has been no collector of these hiwater statistics in the tree. The new convention needs an example, so match Frank's usage by adding a VmPeak line above VmSize to /proc/<pid>/status, and also a VmHWM line above VmRSS (High-Water-Mark or High-Water-Memory). There was a particular anomaly during mremap move, that hiwater_vm might be captured too high. A fleeting such anomaly remains, but it's quickly corrected now, whereas before it would stick. What locking? None: if the app is racy then these statistics will be racy, it's not worth any overhead to make them exact. But whenever it suits, hiwater_vm is updated under exclusive mmap_sem, and hiwater_rss under page_table_lock (for now) or with preemption disabled (later on): without going to any trouble, minimize the time between reading current values and updating, to minimize those occasions when a racing thread bumps a count up and back down in between. Signed-off-by:
Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
365e9c87