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Commit 9ab948a9 authored by David Ahern's avatar David Ahern Committed by David S. Miller
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ipv4: Allow amount of dirty memory from fib resizing to be controllable



fib_trie implementation calls synchronize_rcu when a certain amount of
pages are dirty from freed entries. The number of pages was determined
experimentally in 2009 (commit c3059477).

At the current setting, synchronize_rcu is called often -- 51 times in a
second in one test with an average of an 8 msec delay adding a fib entry.
The total impact is a lot of slow down modifying the fib. This is seen
in the output of 'time' - the difference between real time and sys+user.
For example, using 720,022 single path routes and 'ip -batch'[1]:

    $ time ./ip -batch ipv4/routes-1-hops
    real    0m14.214s
    user    0m2.513s
    sys     0m6.783s

So roughly 35% of the actual time to install the routes is from the ip
command getting scheduled out, most notably due to synchronize_rcu (this
is observed using 'perf sched timehist').

This patch makes the amount of dirty memory configurable between 64k where
the synchronize_rcu is called often (small, low end systems that are memory
sensitive) to 64M where synchronize_rcu is called rarely during a large
FIB change (for high end systems with lots of memory). The default is 512kB
which corresponds to the current setting of 128 pages with a 4kB page size.

As an example, at 16MB the worst interval shows 4 calls to synchronize_rcu
in a second blocking for up to 30 msec in a single instance, and a total
of almost 100 msec across the 4 calls in the second. The trade off is
allowing FIB entries to consume more memory in a given time window but
but with much better fib insertion rates (~30% increase in prefixes/sec).
With this patch and net.ipv4.fib_sync_mem set to 16MB, the same batch
file runs in:

    $ time ./ip -batch ipv4/routes-1-hops
    real    0m9.692s
    user    0m2.491s
    sys     0m6.769s

So the dead time is reduced to about 1/2 second or <5% of the real time.

[1] 'ip' modified to not request ACK messages which improves route
    insertion times by about 20%

Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
parent 12132768
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