[dm-devel] slab-nomerge (was Re: [git pull] device mapper changes for 4.3)

[Christoph Lameter]

On Fri, 4 Sep 2015, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:

> Thus, I could achieve the same performance results by tuning SLUB as I
> could with "slab_nomerge".  Maybe the advantage from "slab_nomerge" was
> just that I got my "own" per CPU structures, and this implicitly larger
> per CPU memory for myself?

Well if multiple slabs are merged then there is potential pressure on the
per node locks if huge amounts of objects are concurrently retrieved from
the per node partial lists by two different subsystems. So cache merging
can increase contention and thereby reduce performance. What you did with
tuning is to reduce that contention by increasing the per cpu pages that
do not require locks.