Multipage allocations

• Main consumer: ZFS ARC
• Addressed in a naive way: go directly into the VM
• First-fit (no prevention of fragmentation)
• Pages mapped/unmapped all the times

iozone -r 32 -s 8192m -l 16 -u 16 -i 0

Informations about the benchmark

Record Size 32 KB
File size set to 33554432 KB
Command line used: iozone -r 32 -s 32768m -l 16 -u 16 -i 0
Output is in Kbytes/sec
Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
Processor cache size set to 1024 Kbytes.
Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
File stride size set to 17 * record size.
Min process = 16 
Max process = 16 
Throughput test with 16 processes
Each process writes a 33554432 Kbyte file in 32 Kbyte records

Informations about the system:

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5670  @ 2.93GHz (2933.40-MHz K8-class CPU)
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 12 CPUs
hw.physmem: 25739268096
vfs.zfs.arc_min: 2984637440
vfs.zfs.arc_max: 23877099520

The following script captures the 'size' argument passed to uma_large_malloc() and build a distribution.

fbt:kernel:uma_large_malloc:entry
{

        @counts[arg0 / 4096] = count();
}

• sorted with 'sort -nrk 2'
• First column: number of pages requested
• Second column: total number of requests

       32          5115028
        4           155907
        2            10386
        3             4282
        5             1455
        8             1247
        6             1033
        7              721
       12              620
        9              481
       10              464
       11              394
       16              269
       13              263
       14              228
       15              189
       20              143
       17              143
       18              114
       26              104
       19               83
       21               81
       22               52
       24               48
       23               32
       27               25
       28               23
       31               22
       30               16
       29               15
25               11

• pmcstat -S instructions
• zfs checksum disabled

%SAMP IMAGE      FUNCTION             CALLERS
 57.6 kernel     __mtx_lock_sleep     _vm_map_lock
 14.4 kernel     pmap_enter           kmem_back
  2.3 kernel     cpu_search_highest   cpu_search_highest
  1.4 kernel     _sx_xlock
  1.2 kernel     _sx_xunlock
  0.8 libc.so.7  bsearch
  0.7 kernel     vm_page_splay
  0.6 kernel     _mtx_lock_spin_cooki pmclog_reserve
  0.6 zfs.ko     lzjb_compress        zio_compress_data

Average cost per allocation, measured wrapping the code for allocations between two calls to rdtsc():

debug.calls_free: 4394689
debug.cycles_free: 2397454367445
debug.calls_alloc: 4396755
debug.cycles_alloc: 2853281095838

Avg per alloc: 648951
Avg per free: 545534

Make allocations going through UMA rather than the VM layer creating zone for 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 pages (in sys/kern/kern_malloc.c)

debug.calls_free: 5010701
debug.cycles_free: 2976686362
debug.calls_alloc: 5012661
debug.cycles_alloc: 18496362281

Avg per alloc: 3689
Avg per free: 594