One of the most important jobs of sysctl is to export network stack
tunables. Several of those tunables are per network device. In
several instances people are running with 1000+ network devices in
there network stacks, which makes the simple per directory linked list
in sysctl a scaling bottleneck. Replace O(N^2) sysctl insertion and
lookup times with O(NlogN) by using an rbtree to index the sysctl
directories.
Benchmark before:
make-dummies 0 999 -> 0.32s
rmmod dummy -> 0.12s
make-dummies 0 9999 -> 1m17s
rmmod dummy -> 17s
Benchmark after:
make-dummies 0 999 -> 0.074s
rmmod dummy -> 0.070s
make-dummies 0 9999 -> 3.4s
rmmod dummy -> 0.44s
Benchmark after (without dev_snmp6):
make-dummies 0 9999 -> 0.75s
rmmod dummy -> 0.44s
make-dummies 0 99999 -> 11s
rmmod dummy -> 4.3s
At 10,000 dummy devices the bottleneck becomes the time to add and
remove the files under /proc/sys/net/dev_snmp6. I have commented
out the code that adds and removes files under /proc/sys/net/dev_snmp6
and taken measurments of creating and destroying 100,000 dummies to
verify the sysctl continues to scale.
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>