linux-kernel - Re: Linux 2.6.29

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Message-ID: <72dbd3150903241324n2d77b34cx5681ce0520e80887@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:24:18 -0700
From:	David Rees <drees76@...il.com>
To:	Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Alan Cox <alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>,
	Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@...cle.com>,
	David Rees <drees76@...il.com>, Jesper Krogh <jesper@...gh.cc>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.29

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu> wrote:
> However, what I've found, though, is that if you're just doing a local
> copy from one hard drive to another, or downloading a huge iso file
> from an ftp server over a wide area network, the fsync() delays really
> don't get *that* bad, even with ext3.  At least, I haven't found a
> workload that doesn't involve either dd if=/dev/zero or a massive
> amount of data coming in over the network that will cause fsync()
> delays in the > 1-2 second category.  Ext3 has been around for a long
> time, and it's only been the last couple of years that people have
> really complained about this; my theory is that it was the rise of >
> 10 megabit ethernets and the use of systems like distcc that really
> made this problem really become visible.  The only realistic workload
> I've found that triggers this requires a fast network dumping data to
> a local filesystem.

It's pretty easy to reproduce it these days.  Here's my setup, and
it's not even that fancy:  Dual core Xeon, 8GB RAM, SATA RAID1 array,
GigE network.  All it takes is a single client writing a large file
using Samba or NFS to introduce huge latencies.

Looking at the raw throughput, the server's disks can sustain
30-60MB/s writes (older disks), but the network can handle up to
~100MB/s.  Throw in some other random seeky IO on the server, a bunch
of fragmentation and it's sustained write throughput in reality for
these writes is more like 10-25MB/s, far slower than the rate at which
a client can throw data at it.

5% dirty_ratrio * 8GB is 400MB.  Let's say in reality the system is
flushing 20MB/s to disk, this is a delay of up to 20 seconds.  Let's
say you have a user application which needs to fsync a number of small
files (and unfortunately they are done serially) and now I've got
applications (like Firefox) which basically remain unresponsive the
entire time the write is being done.

> (I'm sure someone will be ingeniuous enough to find something else
> though, and if they're interested, I've attached an fsync latency
> tester to this note.  If you find something; let me know, I'd be
> interested.)

Thanks - I'll give the program a shot later with my test case and see
what it reports.  My simple test case[1] for reproducing this has
reported 6-45 seconds depending on the system.  I'll try it with the
previously mentioned workload as well.

-Dave

[1] http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309#c249
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