Date:	Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:09:21 +0100
From:	Richard Kennedy <richard@....demon.co.uk>
To:	Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>
Cc:	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	lkml <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] mm: stop balance_dirty_pages doing too much work

On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 11:22 -0400, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 03:36:01PM +0100, Richard Kennedy wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 14:20 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 11:38 +0100, Richard Kennedy wrote:
> > ...
> > > OK, so Chris ran into this bit yesterday, complaining that he'd only get
> > > very few write requests and couldn't saturate his IO channel.
> > > 
> > > Now, since writing out everything once there's something to do sucks for
> > > Richard, but only writing out stuff when we're over the limit sucks for
> > > Chris (since we can only be over the limit a little), the best thing
> > > would be to only write out when we're over the background limit. Since
> > > that is the low watermark we use for throttling it makes sense that we
> > > try to write out when above that.
> > > 
> > > However, since there's a lack of bdi_background_thresh, and I don't
> > > think introducing one just for this is really justified. How about the
> > > below?
> > > 
> > > Chris how did this work for you? Richard, does this make things suck for
> > > you again?
> > > 
> > > ---
> > >  mm/page-writeback.c |    2 +-
> > >  1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
> > > 
> > > diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
> > > index 81627eb..92f42d6 100644
> > > --- a/mm/page-writeback.c
> > > +++ b/mm/page-writeback.c
> > > @@ -545,7 +545,7 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct address_space *mapping)
> > >  		 * threshold otherwise wait until the disk writes catch
> > >  		 * up.
> > >  		 */
> > > -		if (bdi_nr_reclaimable > bdi_thresh) {
> > > +		if (bdi_nr_reclaimable > bdi_thresh/2) {
> 
> My patch had two extra spaces ;)
> 
> > >  			writeback_inodes(&wbc);
> > >  			pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
> > >  			get_dirty_limits(&background_thresh, &dirty_thresh,
> > > 
> > > 
> > I'll run some tests and let you know :)
> > 
> > But what if someone has changed the vm settings?
> > Maybe something like 
> > 	(bdi_thresh * dirty_background_ratio / dirty_ratio)
> > might be better ?
> > 
> > Chris, what sort of workload are you having problems with?
> 
> So, buffered writeback in general has a bunch of interesting features
> right now, and to be honest I'm having a hard time untangling all of it.
> It doesn't help that each of our filesystems is reacting differently.
> 
> Btrfs and XFS both use helper threads to process IO completion.  This
> means that we tend to collect more writeback pages than the other
> filesystems do.
> 
> The end result of this is that O_DIRECT is dramatically faster than
> buffered on every streaming write workload I've tried.  I'm still trying
> to sort out exactly where buffered IO is going wrong.
> 
> -chris
> 
Yes, it's all pretty complex.
With a large number of pages in writeback do you think that the total
dirty pages goes over the threshold ?
I do wonder how long we get stuck in congestion_wait, it may be
interesting to see if reducing its timeout has any effect. 

I've been experimenting with rewriting balance_dirty_pages to reduce the
number of calls to global_page_state. Those counters share a cacheline
and are fairly hot. So far it's looking good & improving simple write
performance particularly when the write size is just over the dirty
threshold.

regard
Richard

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