GitLab

It turns out that at least some versions of glibc end up reading
/proc/meminfo at every single startup, because glibc wants to know the
amount of memory the machine has.  And while that's arguably insane,
it's just how things are.

And it turns out that it's not all that expensive most of the time, but
the vmalloc information statistics (amount of virtual memory used in the
vmalloc space, and the biggest remaining chunk) can be rather expensive
to compute.

The 'get_vmalloc_info()' function actually showed up on my profiles as
4% of the CPU usage of "make test" in the git source repository, because
the git tests are lots of very short-lived shell-scripts etc.

It turns out that apparently this same silly vmalloc info gathering
shows up on the facebook servers too, according to Dave Jones.  So it's
not just "make test" for git.

We had two patches to just cache the information (one by me, one by
Ingo) to mitigate this issue, but the whole vmalloc information...