GitLab

On large systems, when some slab caches grow to millions of objects (and
many gigabytes), running 'cat /proc/slabinfo' can take up to 1-2
seconds.  During this time, interrupts are disabled while walking the
slab lists (slabs_full, slabs_partial, and slabs_free) for each node,
and this sometimes causes timeouts in other drivers (for instance,
Infiniband).

This patch optimizes 'cat /proc/slabinfo' by maintaining a counter for
total number of allocated slabs per node, per cache.  This counter is
updated when a slab is created or destroyed.  This enables us to skip
traversing the slabs_full list while gathering slabinfo statistics, and
since slabs_full tends to be the biggest list when the cache is large,
it results in a dramatic performance improvement.  Getting slabinfo
statistics now only requires walking the slabs_free and slabs_partial
lists, and those lists are usually much smaller than slabs_full.

We tested this after growing the dentry cache ...