xfs: improve sync behaviour in the face of aggressive dirtying
The following script from Wu Fengguang shows very bad behaviour in XFS when aggressively dirtying data during a sync on XFS, with sync times up to almost 10 times as long as ext4. A large part of the issue is that XFS writes data out itself two times in the ->sync_fs method, overriding the livelock protection in the core writeback code, and another issue is the lock-less xfs_ioend_wait call, which doesn't prevent new ioend from being queue up while waiting for the count to reach zero. This patch removes the XFS-internal sync calls and relies on the VFS to do it's work just like all other filesystems do. Note that the i_iocount wait which is rather suboptimal is simply removed here. We already do it in ->write_inode, which keeps the current supoptimal behaviour. We'll eventually need to remove that as well, but that's material for a separate commit. ------------------------------ snip ------------------------------ #!/bin/sh umount /dev/sda7 mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sda7 # mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda7 # mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda7 mount /dev/sda7 /fs echo $((50<<20)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes pid= for i in `seq 10` do dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero-$i bs=1M count=1000 & pid="$pid $!" done sleep 1 tic=$(date +'%s') sync tac=$(date +'%s') echo echo sync time: $((tac-tic)) egrep '(Dirty|Writeback|NFS_Unstable)' /proc/meminfo pidof dd > /dev/null && { kill -9 $pid; echo sync NOT livelocked; } ------------------------------ snip ------------------------------ Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Reported-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Reviewed-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com> Reviewed-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
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