[$] Shrinking shrinker locking overhead Much of the kernel's performance is dependent on caching — keeping useful information around for future use to avoid the cost of looking it up again. The kernel aggressively caches pages of file data, directory entries, inodes, slab objects, and much more. Without active measures, though, caches will tend to grow without bounds, leading to memory exhaustion. The kernel's "shrinker" mechanism exists to be that active measure, but shrinkers have some performance difficulties of their own. <a href="https://lwn.net/ml/linux-mm/20230911094444.68966-1-zhengqi.arch@bytedance.com/" rel="nofollow">This patch series</a> from Qi Zheng seeks to address one of the worst of those by removing some locking overhead. https://lwn.net/Articles/944199/