Ken Chen submitted a patch to reduce the memory footprint of schedstat in a thread titled, "schedstat needs a diet". He explained, "schedstat is useful in investigating CPU scheduler behavior. Ideally, I think it is beneficial to have it on all the time. However, the cost of turning it on in production system is quite high, largely due to number of events it collects and also due to its large memory footprint." His patch converted numerous unsigned long variables to unsigned int, "most of the fields probably don't need to be [a] full 64-bits on 64-bit [architectures]. Rolling over 4 billion events will most likly take a long time and user space tools can be made to accommodate that."

Ingo Molnar merged the patch into his scheduler development tree suggesting there were further conversions that could be made, "note that current -git has a whole bunch of new schedstats fields in /proc//sched which can be used to track the exact balancing behavior of tasks. It can be cleared via echoing 0 to the file - so overflow is not an issue. Most of those new fields should probably be unsigned int too. (they are u64 right now.)"