[PATCH 00/13] VFS: Filesystem information [ver #19]

[Miklos Szeredi]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 10:37 AM Miklos Szeredi <miklos at szeredi.hu> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 10:27 AM David Howells <dhowells at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Miklos Szeredi <miklos at szeredi.hu> wrote:
> >
> > > According to dhowell's measurements processing 100k mounts would take
> > > about a few seconds of system time (that's the time spent by the
> > > kernel to retrieve the data,
> >
> > But the inefficiency of mountfs - at least as currently implemented - scales
> > up with the number of individual values you want to retrieve, both in terms of
> > memory usage and time taken.
>
> I've taken that into account when guesstimating a "few seconds per
> 100k entries".  My guess is that there's probably an order of
> magnitude difference between the performance of a fs based interface
> and a binary syscall based interface.  That could be reduced somewhat
> with a readfile(2) type API.

And to show that I'm not completely off base, attached a patch that
adds a limited readfile(2) syscall and uses it in the p2 method.

Results are promising:

./test-fsinfo-perf /tmp/a 30000
--- make mounts ---
--- test fsinfo by path ---
sum(mnt_id) = 930000
--- test fsinfo by mnt_id ---
sum(mnt_id) = 930000
--- test /proc/fdinfo ---
sum(mnt_id) = 930000
--- test mountfs ---
sum(mnt_id) = 930000
For   30000 mounts, f=    146400us f2=    136766us p=   1406569us p2=
  221669us; p=9.6*f p=10.3*f2 p=6.3*p2
--- umount ---

This is about a 2 fold increase in speed compared to open + read + close.

Is someone still worried about performance, or can we move on to more
interesting parts of the design?

Thanks,
Miklos