Re: Page cache write performance issue

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Wed Oct 13 2004 - 03:17:49 EST




Nathan Scott wrote:

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 12:02:06AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

Well something else if fishy: how can you possibly achieve only 4MB/sec?


These are 1K writes too remember, so it feels a bit like we
write 'em out one at a time, sync (though no O_SYNC, or fsync,
or such involved here). This is on an i686, so 4K pages, and
using 4K filesystem blocksizes (both xfs and ext2).



Still shouldn't cause such a big slowdown. Seems like they
might be getting written off the end of the page reclaim
LRU (although in that case it is a bit odd that increasing
the dirty thresholds are improving performance).

I don't think we have any vmscan metrics for this... kswapd
definitely has become more active in 2.6.9-rc. If you're stuck
for ideas, try editing mm/vmscan.c:may_write_to_queue - comment
out the if(current_is_kswapd()) check.

It is a long shot though. Andrew probably has better ideas.

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