Re: Page Cache writeback too slow, SSD/noop scheduler/ext2

From: Jos Houtman
Date: Mon Mar 30 2009 - 11:47:39 EST



>> Thanx for the patch, but for the next time: How should I apply it?
>> it seems to be context aware (@@) and broke on all kernel versions I tried
>> 2.6.28/2.6.28.7/2.6.29
>
> Do you mean that the patch applies after removing " @@.*$"?

I didn't try that, but this time it worked. So it was probably my error.

>
> You are right. In your case, there are several big dirty files in sdb1,
> and the sdb write queue is constantly (almost-)congested. The SSD write
> speed is so slow, that in each round of sdb1 writeback, it begins with
> an uncongested queue, but quickly fills up after writing some pages.
> Hence all the inodes will get redirtied because of (nr_to_write > 0).
>
> The following quick fix should solve the slow-writeback-on-congested-SSD
> problem. However the writeback sequence is suboptimal: it sync-and-requeue
> each file until congested (in your case about 3~600 pages) instead of
> until MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES=1024 pages.

Yeah that fixed it, but performance dropped due to the more constant
congestion. So I will need to try some different io schedulers.


Next to that I was wondering if there are any plans to make sure that not
all dirty-files are written back in the same interval.

In my case all database files are written back each 30 seconds, while I
would prefer them to be more divided over the interval.

Thanks,

Jos

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