I was running the updated patches on machines with various workloads, and have a bunch of different results.
For the following numbers, Effective = hit / (hit + empty + stall) * 100 In other words, show the hit rate for for every trip to the cache, and the cache full stat is ignored. On a webserver: [web] # ./eff ('rx_pool_cache_hit:', '360127643') ('rx_pool_cache_full:', '0') ('rx_pool_cache_empty:', '6455735977') ('rx_pool_ring_produce:', '474958') ('rx_pool_ring_consume:', '0') ('rx_pool_ring_return:', '474958') ('rx_pool_flush:', '144') ('rx_pool_node_change:', '0') cache effectiveness: 5.28 On a proxygen: # ethtool -S eth0 | grep rx_pool rx_pool_cache_hit: 1646798 rx_pool_cache_full: 0 rx_pool_cache_empty: 15723566 rx_pool_ring_produce: 474958 rx_pool_ring_consume: 0 rx_pool_ring_return: 474958 rx_pool_flush: 144 rx_pool_node_change: 0 cache effectiveness: 9.48 On both of these, only pages with refcount = 1 are being kept. I changed things around in the page pool so: 1) the cache behaves like a ring instead of a stack, this sacrifices temporal locality. 2) it caches all pages returned regardless of refcount, but only returns pages with refcount=1. This is the same behavior as the mlx5 cache. Some gains would come about if the sojourn time though the cache is greater than the lifetime of the page usage by the networking stack, as it provides a fixed working set of mapped pages. On the web server, this is a net loss: [web] # ./eff ('rx_pool_cache_hit:', '6052662') ('rx_pool_cache_full:', '156355415') ('rx_pool_cache_empty:', '409600') ('rx_pool_cache_stall:', '302787473') ('rx_pool_ring_produce:', '156633847') ('rx_pool_ring_consume:', '9925520') ('rx_pool_ring_return:', '278788') ('rx_pool_flush:', '96') ('rx_pool_node_change:', '0') cache effectiveness: 1.95720846778 For proxygen on the other hand, it's a win: [proxy] # ./eff ('rx_pool_cache_hit:', '69235177') ('rx_pool_cache_full:', '35404387') ('rx_pool_cache_empty:', '460800') ('rx_pool_cache_stall:', '42932530') ('rx_pool_ring_produce:', '35717618') ('rx_pool_ring_consume:', '27879469') ('rx_pool_ring_return:', '404800') ('rx_pool_flush:', '108') ('rx_pool_node_change:', '0') cache effectiveness: 61.4721608624 So the correct behavior isn't quite clear cut here - caching a working set of mapped pages is beneficial in spite of the HOL blocking stalls for some workloads, but I'm sure that it wouldn't be too difficult to exceed the WS size. Thoughts? -- Jonathan