Re: VM idle page zeroing

[Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    Here are buildworld times on my test box with and without pre-zeroing,
    single threaded (no -j option used):

    /usr/bin/time -l make buildworld >& /tmp/bw.out

     2306.94 real      1740.54 user       393.90 sys	nocache=1, enable=1
     2305.50 real      1738.80 user       397.38 sys	nocache=1, enable=1
     2306.85 real      1736.72 user       399.62 sys	nocache=1, enable=1
     2307.96 real      1737.63 user       398.24 sys	nocache=1, enable=1
     2306.22 real      1741.29 user       395.15 sys	nocache=1, enable=1
     2320.21 real      1739.50 user       396.49 sys	nocache=1, enable=1
     2311.48 real      1739.04 user       396.29 sys	nocache=1, enable=1
     2323.78 real      1735.54 user       399.61 sys	nocache=1, enable=1

     2331.38 real      1733.84 user       417.91 sys	enable=0
     2327.75 real      1733.74 user       415.24 sys	enable=0
     2322.29 real      1731.73 user       419.57 sys	enable=0
     2327.53 real      1729.05 user       416.27 sys	enable=0
     2335.71 real      1731.32 user       417.93 sys	enable=0

    As you can see it does seem to make a small difference.  The system
    time is about 20 seconds (4.8%) faster with pre-zeroing and the real
    time is around ~18 seconds (0.7%) or so faster.

    What this says, basically, is that the pre-zeroing helps out serialized
    operations (such as shell scripts) which have a lot of zfod faults but
    probably doesn't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

    I also tried some bursting tests but it turns out that once the system
    is in a steady state the VM free page queue doesn't have enough pages
    to really be able to handle the zfod fault rate.  So I bumped 
    vm.v_free_target to an absurdly high number like 100000 (400MB) and
    ran a little shell script which ran /bin/echo in a big loop and I
    got:

	#!/bin/csh
	#
	set i = 0
	while ( $i < 10000 )
	    /bin/echo fubar > /dev/null
	    @ i = $i + 1
	end


    0.437u 1.148s 0:01.59 98.7%     342+164k 0+0io 0pf+0w  idlezero enabled
    0.460u 1.257s 0:01.71 100.0%    313+155k 0+0io 0pf+0w  idlezero disabled

    Or around a 7% execution time difference.  The problem, though, is that
    the system really needs a large number of free pages so the zfod zero
    fault burst doesn't drain the pre-zerod page cache during the test.

    With the default vm.v_free_target of 20000 on this box (40MB) the zfod
    faults strip out the pre-zerod pages almost instantly and the pgzero
    thread can't keep up.  Run times wind up being 1.69 or only 1.2%
    faster.

    I then tried bumping up vm.idlezero_rate to infinity (well, 999999)
    with a normal vm.v_free_target and that helped some.  I got numbers
    in the 1.61 to 1.65 range.

    It may well be that the correct answer here is to remove the rate
    limiting entirely.

						-Matt