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squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good area 

Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609ab ("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 <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Tested-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
hifive-unleashed-5.1
Wu Fengguang 2011-08-16 13:37:14 -06:00
parent 93ee7a9340
commit bb0822954a
2 changed files with 2 additions and 24 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

11
include/linux/writeback.h
View File

@ -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

15
mm/page-writeback.c
View File

@ -754,21 +754,10 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct address_space *mapping,
* 200ms is typically more than enough to curb heavy dirtiers;
* (b) the pause time limit makes the dirtiers more responsive.
*/
if (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh +
dirty_thresh / DIRTY_MAXPAUSE_AREA &&
if (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh &&
bdi_dirty < (task_bdi_thresh + bdi_thresh) / 2 &&
time_after(jiffies, start_time + MAX_PAUSE))
break;
/*
* pass-good area. When some bdi gets blocked (eg. NFS server
* not responding), or write bandwidth dropped dramatically due
* to concurrent reads, or dirty threshold suddenly dropped and
* the dirty pages cannot be brought down anytime soon (eg. on
* slow USB stick), at least let go of the good bdi's.
*/
if (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh +
dirty_thresh / DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA &&
bdi_dirty < bdi_thresh)
break;
/*
* Increase the delay for each loop, up to our previous