Re: OptionalObsoleteFiles.inc completeness

From: Peter Jeremy <peter_at_rulingia.com>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2012 07:20:42 +1000
On 2012-May-30 13:27:03 +1000, Peter Jeremy <peter_at_rulingia.com> wrote:
>On 2012-May-29 02:18:25 +0400, Dmitry Marakasov <amdmi3_at_amdmi3.ru> wrote:
>>Then you should try to profile it - my script basically runs
>>delete-old delete-old-libs for every knob (131 of them), and it
>>hadn't taken more than 4 seconds even once.
>
>I've done some investigating and the problem is that "xargs -n1"
>fork()/exec()s /bin/echo on each file (and there are 5538 files for
>me).  Changing this to "tr ' ' '\n'" reduces "make delete-old" runtime
>to 1.75s - which is much nicer.  I've checked a variety of other
>systems running 8.x & 9.x and the 97s seems to be anomalously long so
>I'll do some more investigating.

I've tracked the problem down to excessive VM faults caused by
jemalloc.  Whilst executing /bin/echo, jemalloc mmap()s two 4MiB
chunks of memory.  Unless you build with MALLOC_PRODUCTION (which I
hadn't), it then proceeds to verify that both blocks are zero-filled.
This causes 2048 (unnecessary) page faults (out of a total of 2133).
When I rebuilt jemalloc with MALLOC_PRODUCTION, this dropped to 87
page faults (cf 76 an 8.x and 62 on 9.x) and the elapsed time for
"make delete-old" dropped to slightly more than 8.x & 9.x.

"xargs -n1" is probably a worst case scenario for jemalloc but this
probably similarly affects other short-lived processes (and the shell
scripts that invoke them).  It's a pity that this particular test is a
compile-time option.

I still think that saving 5500 fork()/exec() pairs is a good reason
to switch from "xargs -n1" to "tr ' ' '\n'".

-- 
Peter Jeremy

Received on Thu May 31 2012 - 19:20:59 UTC

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