Date:	Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:30:50 -0400
From:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>
To:	Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@...hat.com>
Cc:	Fredrick <fjohnber@...o.com>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	Andreas Dilger <adilger@...ger.ca>, wenqing.lz@...bao.com
Subject: Re: ext4_fallocate

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 09:13:35AM -0400, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> 
> Has anyone made progress digging into the performance impact of
> running without this patch? We should definitely see if there is
> some low hanging fruit there, especially given that XFS does not
> seem to suffer such a huge hit.

I just haven't had time, sorry.  It's so much easier to run with the
patch.  :-)

Part of the problem certainly caused by the fact that ext4 is using
physical block journaling instead of logical journalling.  But we see
the problem in no-journal mode as well.  I think part of the problem
is simply that many of the workloads where people are doing this, they
also care about robustness after power failures, and if you are doing
random writes into uninitialized space, with fsyncs in-between, you
are basically guaranteed a 2x expansion in the number of writes you
need to do to the system.

One other thing which we *have* seen is that we need to do a better
job with extent merging; if you run without this patch, and you run
with fio in AIO mode where you are doing tons and tons of random
writes into uninitialized space, you can end up fragmenting the extent
tree very badly.   So fixing this would certainly help.

> Opening this security exposure is still something that is clearly a
> hack and best avoided if we can fix the root cause :)

See Linus's recent rant about how security arguments made by
theoreticians very often end up getting trumped by practical matters.
If you are running a daemon, whether it is a user-mode cluster file
system, or a database server, where it is (a) fundamentally trusted,
and (b) doing its own user-space checksuming and its own guarantees to
never return uninitialized data, even if we fix all potential
problems, we *still* can be reducing the number of random writes ---
and on a fully loaded system, we're guaranteed to be seek-constrained,
so each random write to update fs metadata means that you're burning
0.5% of your 200 seeks/second on your 3TB disk (where previously you
had half a dozen 500gig disks each with 200 seeks/second).

I agree with you that it would be nice to look into this further, and
optimizing our extent merging is definitely on the hot list of
perofrmance improvements to look at.  But people who are using ext4 as
back-end database servers or cluster file system servers and who are
interested in wringing out every last percentage of performace are
going to be interested in this technique, no matter what we do.  If
you have Sagans and Sagans of servers all over the world, even a tenth
of a percentage point performance improvement can easily translate
into big dollars.

						- Ted
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