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  1. 19 Aug, 2011 1 commit
    • Wu Fengguang's avatar
      squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good area · bb082295
      Wu Fengguang authored 
      Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609 ("writeback:
introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits") and make the max-pause
area smaller and safe.

This fixes ~30% performance regression in the ext3 data=writeback
fio_mmap_randwrite_64k/fio_mmap_randrw_64k test cases, where there are
12 JBOD disks, on each disk runs 8 concurrent tasks doing reads+writes.

Using deadline scheduler also has a regression, but not that big as CFQ,
so this suggests we have some write starvation.

The test logs show that

- the disks are sometimes under utilized

- global dirty pages sometimes rush high to the pass-good area for
  several hundred seconds, while in the mean time some bdi dirty pages
  drop to very low value (bdi_dirty << bdi_thresh).  Then suddenly the
  global dirty pages dropped under global dirty threshold and bdi_dirty
  rush very high (for example, 2 times higher than bdi_thresh). During
  which time balance_dirty_pages() is not called at all.

So the problems are

1) The random writes progress so slow that they break the assumption of
   the max-pause logic that "8 pages per 200ms is typically more than
   enough to curb heavy dirtiers".

2) The max-pause logic ignored task_bdi_thresh and thus opens the possibility
   for some bdi's to over dirty pages, leading to (bdi_dirty >> bdi_thresh)
   and then (bdi_thresh >> bdi_dirty) for others.

3) The higher max-pause/pass-good thresholds somehow leads to the bad
   swing of dirty pages.

The fix is to allow the task to slightly dirty over task_bdi_thresh, but
no way to exceed bdi_dirty and/or global dirty_thresh.

Tests show that it fixed the JBOD regression completely (both behavior
and performance), while still being able to cut down large pause times
in balance_dirty_pages() for single-disk cases.
Reported-by: default avatarLi Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Tested-by: default avatarLi Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Acked-by: default avatarJan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: default avatarWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
      bb082295
  3. 14 Aug, 2011 13 commits
  5. 13 Aug, 2011 23 commits
  7. 12 Aug, 2011 3 commits
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