Currently, count_active_tasks() calls both nr_running() &
nr_interruptible(). Each of these functions does a "for_each_cpu" & reads
values from the runqueue of each cpu. Although this is not a lot of
instructions, each runqueue may be located on different node. Depending on
the architecture, a unique TLB entry may be required to access each
runqueue.
Since there may be more runqueues than cpu TLB entries, a scan of all
runqueues can trash the TLB. Each memory reference incurs a TLB miss &
refill.
In addition, the runqueue cacheline that contains nr_running &
nr_uninterruptible may be evicted from the cache between the two passes.
This causes unnecessary cache misses.
Combining nr_running() & nr_interruptible() into a single function
substantially reduces the TLB & cache misses on large systems. This should
have no measureable effect on smaller systems.
On a 128p IA64 system running a memory stress workload, the new function
reduced the overhead of calc_load() from 605 usec/call to 324 usec/call.
Signed-off-by: Jack Steiner <steiner@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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