Recently while working on another patch about batching free_pcppages_bulk [1], I was curious why pcp->batch was always 63 on my machine. This led me to zone_batchsize(), where I found this set of lines to determine what the batch size should be for the host: batch = min(zone_managed_pages(zone) >> 10, SZ_1M / PAGE_SIZE); batch /= 4; /* We effectively *= 4 below */ if (batch < 1) batch = 1; All of this is good, except the comment above which says "We effectively *= 4 below". Nowhere else in the function zone_batchsize(), is there a corresponding multipliation by 4. Looking into the history of this, it seems like Dave Hansen had also noticed this back in 2013 [1]. Turns out there *used* to be a corresponding *= 4, which was turned into a *= 6 later on to be used in pageset_setup_from_batch_size(), which no longer exists. Despite this mismatch not being corrected in the comments, it seems that getting rid of the /= 4 leads to a performance regression on machines with less than 250G memory and 176 processors. As such, let us preserve the functionality but clean up the comments. Fold the /= 4 into the calculation above: bitshift by 10+2=12, and instead of dividing 1MB, divide 256KB and adjust the comments accordingly. No functional change intended. Suggested-by: Dave Hansen Signed-off-by: Joshua Hahn [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20251002204636.4016712-1-joshua.hahnjy@gmail.com/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20131015203547.8724C69C@viggo.jf.intel.com/ --- mm/page_alloc.c | 7 +++---- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c index 600d9e981c23..39368cdc953d 100644 --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -5860,13 +5860,12 @@ static int zone_batchsize(struct zone *zone) int batch; /* - * The number of pages to batch allocate is either ~0.1% - * of the zone or 1MB, whichever is smaller. The batch + * The number of pages to batch allocate is either ~0.025% + * of the zone or 256KB, whichever is smaller. The batch * size is striking a balance between allocation latency * and zone lock contention. */ - batch = min(zone_managed_pages(zone) >> 10, SZ_1M / PAGE_SIZE); - batch /= 4; /* We effectively *= 4 below */ + batch = min(zone_managed_pages(zone) >> 12, SZ_256K / PAGE_SIZE); if (batch < 1) batch = 1; -- 2.47.3