Re: large pause when opening file descriptor which is power of 2

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 05:58:06PM +0000, Kernel.org Bugbot wrote:
> When running a threaded program, and opening a file descriptor that
> is a power of 2 (starting at 64), the call takes a very long time to
> complete. Normally such a call takes less than 2us. However with this
> issue, I've seen the call take up to around 50ms. Additionally this only
> happens the first time, and not subsequent times that file descriptor is
> used. I'm guessing there might be some expansion of some internal data
> structures going on. But I cannot see why this process would take so long.

Because we allocate a new block of memory and then memcpy() the old
block of memory into it.  This isn't surprising behaviour to me.
I don't think there's much we can do to change it (Allocating a
segmented array of file descriptors has previously been vetoed by
people who have programs with a million file descriptors).  Is it
causing you problems?