Date:	Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:35:17 -0400
From:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>
To:	Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, Jan kara <jack@...e.cz>
Subject: Re: ext4 extent status tree LRU locking

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 09:27:15PM +0800, Zheng Liu wrote:
> Thanks for your suggestion.  But, sorry, I couldn't get your point here.
> As you suggested above, we can tag each inode with the last access time
> when ext4_map_blocks() is called.  Then we will get an unsorted list of
> inodes with some extent entries.  When we tries to reclaim some entries
> from extent cache, we can call list_sort() to get an sorted list of
> inodes and try to reclaim some entries according to the last access
> time.  My question is why do we need to drop all of the entries from all
> inodes.

Sorry, what I meant to say is to drop all of the entries from a
particular inode.  That is, instead of making the decision to drop one
or two extents from inode A because they haven't been used in a long
time, or one or two extents from inode B because they haven't been
used in a long time, we make the decision on an inode by inode basis.

> Af far as I understand, we can do the following improvement.  We tag the
> last access time for each inode.  So that would avoid to move the inode
> in lru list frequently.  When we try to reclaim some entries, we call
> list_sort() to get a sorted lru list, and drop some entries from lru
> list.  Please correct me if I misunderstood.

Yes, that's what I meant; although note that depending on how many
items we need to drop, it might not be necesary to do a full sort of
the list --- we could just look for the inode with the oldest time,
which would be O(n) rather than O(n log n).

If we are under enough memory pressure that the shrinker is getting
called a lot, maybe it would be worthwhile keep a list of the oldest N
inodes, which only gets updated every so many seconds.  (Since we can
always validate whether or not an inode has been touched since it had
been put on the oldest N inodes very easily.)

> For creating all extent leaf blocks, that is another improvement.  I
> will try to add it after I solve current problem that Dave reported.

Yes, it's a separable issue, but it's related to the same idea.  We
should drop items in the cache which can be easily instaniated at the
time same time (i.e., drop all of the items related to a particular
extent leaf block, or all of the items related to a particular inode).

There are of course, other hueristics we could use, such as only
searching inodes which have open file descriptors.  It's not clear the
benefit is worth the cost of determining which inodes fit a particular
criteria or not, though.

One other possibility while we're brainstorming is using hints from
posix_fadvise or madvise to drop items from the extent cache.  The
cautions with this idea are (a) not that many applications provide
those hints, and (b) just because one process declares that it doesn't
anticipate needing to access a particular file, doesn't mean that it
is true for other users of the same file.  A related classical problem
is the backup program which reads every single file in the file system
once.  There's no particular good reason to have the backup program's
activities affect the caches in the system, whether it be the page
cache or the extent cache.  The trick is determining whether or not a
particular program is behaving like a backup program or not, either
via a hueristic or via an explicit hint/declaration from the program.

Cheers,

      		       	  	   		    - Ted
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