From bb0822954aab7d23a3f902c2a103ee0242f6046e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Wu Fengguang Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2011 13:37:14 -0600 Subject: squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good area Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609ab10 ("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: Li Shaohua Tested-by: Li Shaohua Acked-by: Jan Kara Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang --- include/linux/writeback.h | 11 ----------- 1 file changed, 11 deletions(-) (limited to 'include') diff --git a/include/linux/writeback.h b/include/linux/writeback.h index f1bfa12ea24..2b8963ff0f3 100644 --- a/include/linux/writeback.h +++ b/include/linux/writeback.h @@ -12,15 +12,6 @@ * * (thresh - thresh/DIRTY_FULL_SCOPE, thresh) * - * The 1/16 region above the global dirty limit will be put to maximum pauses: - * - * (limit, limit + limit/DIRTY_MAXPAUSE_AREA) - * - * The 1/16 region above the max-pause region, dirty exceeded bdi's will be put - * to loops: - * - * (limit + limit/DIRTY_MAXPAUSE_AREA, limit + limit/DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA) - * * Further beyond, all dirtier tasks will enter a loop waiting (possibly long * time) for the dirty pages to drop, unless written enough pages. * @@ -31,8 +22,6 @@ */ #define DIRTY_SCOPE 8 #define DIRTY_FULL_SCOPE (DIRTY_SCOPE / 2) -#define DIRTY_MAXPAUSE_AREA 16 -#define DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA 8 /* * 4MB minimal write chunk size -- cgit v1.2.3-18-g5258