Nick Piggin c32ccd87bf [PATCH] inotify: lock avoidance with parent watch status in dentry ...

Previous inotify work avoidance is good when inotify is completely unused,
but it breaks down if even a single watch is in place anywhere in the
system.  Robin Holt notices that udev is one such culprit - it slows down a
512-thread application on a 512 CPU system from 6 seconds to 22 minutes.

Solve this by adding a flag in the dentry that tells inotify whether or not
its parent inode has a watch on it.  Event queueing to parent will skip
taking locks if this flag is cleared.  Setting and clearing of this flag on
all child dentries versus event delivery: this is no in terms of race
cases, and that was shown to be equivalent to always performing the check.

The essential behaviour is that activity occuring _after_ a watch has been
added and _before_ it has been removed, will generate events.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

2006-03-25 08:22:53 -08:00

3.9 KiB

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