[ltt-dev] LTTng finds abnormally long APIC interrupt handler : 58.2 ms

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 19:11 -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:

> The basic question that arises from this trace is : is it normal for
> find_usage_backwards to be called ~8500 times during a spinlock ?

Yes and no - its O(n^2) graph walking. That said, David Miller did a
cool patch that reduces the graph walk by not doing the same subgraph
over and over again. Look at this series:

  http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/4/175

Andrew picked all that up - so it should be in the next -mm.

It also contains a new scheduler run-queue annotation which should
greatly reduce the chain length, adding to even more benefit.