[PATCH] fix file counting

I have benchmarked this on an x86_64 NUMA system and see no significant
performance difference on kernbench.  Tested on both x86_64 and powerpc.

The way we do file struct accounting is not very suitable for batched
freeing.  For scalability reasons, file accounting was
constructor/destructor based.  This meant that nr_files was decremented
only when the object was removed from the slab cache.  This is susceptible
to slab fragmentation.  With RCU based file structure, consequent batched
freeing and a test program like Serge's, we just speed this up and end up
with a very fragmented slab -

llm22:~ # cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr
587730  0       758844

At the same time, I see only a 2000+ objects in filp cache.  The following
patch I fixes this problem.

This patch changes the file counting by removing the filp_count_lock.
Instead we use a separate percpu counter, nr_files, for now and all
accesses to it are through get_nr_files() api.  In the sysctl handler for
nr_files, we populate files_stat.nr_files before returning to user.

Counting files as an when they are created and destroyed (as opposed to
inside slab) allows us to correctly count open files with RCU.

Signed-off-by: Dipankar Sarma <dipankar@in.ibm.com>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index 0cc34b1c42c9..51c0c93bdf93 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -35,6 +35,7 @@ struct files_stat_struct {
         int max_files;          /* tunable */
 };
 extern struct files_stat_struct files_stat;
+extern int get_max_files(void);
 
 struct inodes_stat_t {
         int nr_inodes;