group and project quota hints are currently stored on the user
dquot. If we are attaching quotas to the inode, then the group and
project dquots are stored as hints on the user dquot to save having
to look them up again later.

The thing is, the hints are not used for that inode for the rest of
the life of the inode - the dquots are attached directly to the
inode itself - so the only time the hints are used is when an inode
first has dquots attached.

When the hints on the user dquot don't match the dquots being
attache dto the inode, they are then removed and replaced with the
new hints. If a user is concurrently modifying files in different
group and/or project contexts, then this leads to thrashing of the
hints attached to user dquot.

If user quotas are not enabled, then hints are never even used.

So, if the hints are used to avoid the cost of the lookup, is the
cost of the lookup significant enough to justify the hint
infrstructure? Maybe it was once, when there was a global quota
manager shared between all XFS filesystems and was hash table based.

However, lookups are now much simpler, requiring only a single lock and
radix tree lookup local to the filesystem and no hash or LRU
manipulations to be made. Hence the cost of lookup is much lower
than when hints were implemented. Turns out that benchmarks show
that, too, with thir being no differnce in performance when doing
file creation workloads as a single user with user, group and
project quotas enabled - the hints do not make the code go any
faster. In fact, removing the hints shows a 2-3% reduction in the
time it takes to create 50 million inodes....

So, let's just get rid of the hints and the complexity around them.
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>