Re: [RFC] Limit the size of the IPV4 route hash.

[Robin Holt <holt@xxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 03:38:48PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Robin Holt <holt@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > The big risk is that someone has a too-small table for some specific
> > > application and their machine runs more slowly than it should, but they
> > > never notice.  I wonder if it would be possible to put a little once-only
> > > printk into the routing code: "warning route-cache chain exceeded 100
> > > entries: consider using the rhash_entries boot option".
> > 
> > Since the hash gets flushed every 10 seconds, what if we kept track of
> > the maximum depth reached and when we reach a certain threshold, just
> > allocate a larger hash and replace the old with the new.  I do like the
> > printk idea so the admin can prevent inconsistent performance early in
> > the run cycle for the system.  We could even scale the hash size up based
> > upon demand.
> 
> Once the system has been running for a while, the possibility of allocating
> a decent number of physically-contiguous pages is basically zero.
> 
> If we were to dynamically size it we'd need to either use new data
> structure (slower) or use vmalloc() (slower and can fragment vmalloc
> space).

Why do they need to be physically contiguous?  It is a hash correct?