Date:	Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:29:39 -0600
From:	Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@...gle.com>
To:	Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>
Cc:	Andreas Dilger <adilger@....com>,
	ext4 development <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Question on block group allocation

Hi Ted:

I don't have access to the actual data right now, because I created
the files and ran the benchmark just before leaving for a few days,
but...

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 03:02:05PM -0700, Curt Wohlgemuth wrote:
>> > This is likely the "uninit_bg" feature that is causing the allocations
>> > to skip groups which are marked BLOCK_UNINIT.  In some sense the benefit
>> > of skipping the block bitmap read during e2fsck is probably not at all
>> > beneficial compared to the cost of the extra seeking during IO.  As the
>> > filesystem gets more full, the BLOCK_UNIIT flags would be cleared anyways,
>> > so we might as well just keep the early allocations contiguous.
>
> Well, I tried out Andreas' patch, by doing an rsync copy from my SSD
> root partition to a 5400 rpm laptop drive, and then ran e2fsck and
> dumpe2fs.  The results were interesting:
>
>               Before Patch                       After Patch
>              Time in seconds                   Time in seconds
>            Real /  User/  Sys   MB/s      Real /  User/  Sys    MB/s
> Pass 1      8.52 / 2.21 / 0.46  20.43      8.84 / 4.97 / 1.11   19.68
> Pass 2     21.16 / 1.02 / 1.86  11.30      6.54 / 1.77 / 1.78   36.39
> Pass 3      0.01 / 0.00 / 0.00 139.00      0.01 / 0.01 / 0.00  128.90
> Pass 4      0.16 / 0.15 / 0.00   0.00      0.17 / 0.17 / 0.00    0.00
> Pass 5      2.52 / 1.99 / 0.09   0.79      2.31 / 1.78 / 0.06    0.86
> Total      32.40 / 5.11 / 2.49  12.81     17.99 / 8.75 / 2.98   23.01
>
> The surprise is in the gross inspection of the dumpe2fs results:
>
>                             Before Patch    After Patch
> # of non-contig files           762             779
> # of non-contig directories     571             570
> # of BLOCK_UNINIT bg's          307             293
> # of INODE_UNINIT bg's          503             503
>
> So the interesting thing is that the patch only "broke open" an
> additional 14 block groups (out of a 333 block groups in use when the
> filesystem was created with the unpatched kernel).  However, this
> allowed the pass 2 directory time to go *down* by over a factor of
> three (from 21.2 seconds with the unpatched ext4 code to 6.5 seconds
> with the the patch.
>
> I think what the patch did was to diminish allocation pressure on the
> first block group in the flex_bg, so we weren't mixing directory and
> regular file contents.  This eliminated seeks during pass 2 of e2fsck,
> which was actually a Very Good Thing.
>
>> > A simple change to verify this would be something like the following,
>> > but it hasn't actually been tested.
>>
>> Tell you what:  I'll try this out and see if it helps out my test case.
>
> Let me know what this does for your test case.  Hopefully the patch
> also makes things better, since this patch is looking very interesting
> right now.

The random read throughput on the 10GB file went from ~16 MB/s to ~22
MB/s after Andreas' patch; the total fragmentation of the file was
much lower than before his patch.

However, the number of extents went up by quite a bit (I don't have
the debugfs output in front of me at the moment, sorry).  It seemed
that no extent crossed a block group; I didn't have time to see if
Andreas' patch disabled flex BGs or not, as to what was going on.

I'll be able to send details out on Tuesday.

Curt

>
> Andreas, can I get a Signed-off-by from you for this patch?
>
> Thanks,
>
>                                                - Ted
>
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