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lm-sensors/lib
Jean Delvare b7b2c45789 libsensors: Get rid of arbitrary limit on per-type sensor count
When gathering the attributes of each hwmon chip, libsensors uses a
temporary structure in memory to order and group all the attributes
into features. This temporary structure used to be a single array with
room for every possible attribute/subfeature. While simple, this
approach required to predefine a maximum number of per-type sensor
that could be handled.

In order to get rid of this arbitrary limit, which we hit and had to
raise three times already, I changed the temporary structure to an
array of dynamically allocated per-type subattribute arrays. This lets
us not allocate any memory for types which aren't implemented by a
given chip, and more importantly, this lets us reallocate room for
more attributes of a given type as needed.

I decided to allocate chunks of 8 attributes at a time, as this seemed
a good compromise between two frequent reallocations and
over-provisioning. It could be tweaked if needed.

Icing on the cake, I benchmarked this change on two different systems
and it results in performance gains. The total heap usage as reported
by valgrind is down by 50% on average, with peak memory consumption
(as reported by valgrind's massif) also down by 43% on average. The
total instructions count (as reported by valgrind's callgrind) is down
by 11% on average, with measured execution time also down by a few
percents. Valgrind rocks, BTW.

I have some ideas to optimize the memory allocations further, but I do
not expect such a huge gain from them. They may not even improve peak
memory consumption as massif shows the peak is somewhere else now at
least in some cases.

Signed-off-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
2014-01-25 09:41:03 -08:00
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