linux-ext4 - Re: getdents - ext4 vs btrfs performance

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Date:	Fri, 2 Mar 2012 14:32:15 -0500
From:	Ted Ts'o <tytso@....edu>
To:	Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>,
	Jacek Luczak <difrost.kernel@...il.com>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: getdents - ext4 vs btrfs performance

On Fri, Mar 02, 2012 at 09:26:51AM -0500, Chris Mason wrote:
> 
> filefrag will tell you how many extents each file has, any file with
> more than one extent is interesting.  (The ext4 crowd may have better
> suggestions on measuring fragmentation).

You can get a *huge* amount of information (probably more than you'll
want to analyze) by doing this:

     e2fsck -nf -E fragcheck /dev/XXXX >& /tmp/fragcheck.out

I haven't had time to do this in a while, but a while back I used this
to debug the writeback code with an eye towards reducing
fragmentation.  At the time I was trying to optimize the case of
reducing fragmentation in the easist case possible, where you start
with an empty file system, and then copy all of the data from another
file system onto it using rsync -avH.

It would be worth while to see what happens with files written by the
compiler and linker.  Given that libelf tends to write .o files
non-sequentially, and without telling us how big the space is in
advance, I could well imagine that we're not doing the best job
avoiding free space fragmentation, which eventually leads to extra
file system aging.

It would be interesting to have a project where someone added
fallocate() support into libelf, and then added some hueristics into
ext4 so that if a file is fallocated to a precise size, or if the file
is fully written and closed before writeback begins, that we use this
to more efficiently pack the space used by the files by the block
allocator.  This is a place where I would not be surprised that XFS
has some better code to avoid accelerated file system aging, and where
we could do better with ext4 with some development effort.

Of course, it might also be possible to hack around this by simply
using VPATH and dropping your build files in a separate place from
your source files, and periodically reformatting the file system where
your build tree lives.  (As a side note, something that works well for
me is to use an SSD for my source files, and a separate 5400rpm HDD
for my build tree.  That allows me to use a smaller and more
affordable SSD, and since the object files can be written
asynchronously by the writeback threads, but the compiler can't move
forward until it gets file data from the .c or .h file, it gets me the
best price/performance for a laptop build environment.)

BTW, I suspect we could make acp even more efficient by teaching it to
use FIEMAP ioctl to map out the data blocks for all of the files in
the source file system, and then copied the files (or perhaps even
parts of files) in a read order which reduced seeking on the source
drive.

						- Ted
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