• Jan Kara's avatar
    ext4: Speedup WB_SYNC_ALL pass called from sync(2) · 10542c22
    Jan Kara authored
    When doing filesystem wide sync, there's no need to force transaction
    commit (or synchronously write inode buffer) separately for each inode
    because ext4_sync_fs() takes care of forcing commit at the end (VFS
    takes care of flushing buffer cache, respectively). Most of the time
    this slowness doesn't manifest because previous WB_SYNC_NONE writeback
    doesn't leave much to write but when there are processes aggressively
    creating new files and several filesystems to sync, the sync slowness
    can be noticeable. In the following test script sync(1) takes around 6
    minutes when there are two ext4 filesystems mounted on a standard SATA
    drive. After this patch sync takes a couple of seconds so we have about
    two orders of magnitude improvement.
    
          function run_writers
          {
            for (( i = 0; i < 10; i++ )); do
              mkdir $1/dir$i
              for (( j = 0; j < 40000; j++ )); do
                dd if=/dev/zero of=$1/dir$i/$j bs=4k count=4 &>/dev/null
              done &
            done
          }
    
          for dir in "$@"; do
            run_writers $dir
          done
    
          sleep 40
          time sync
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
    Signed-off-by: default avatar"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
    10542c22
inode.c 151 KB