Re: [PATCH 2.6.27.y 2/3] ext4: Fix file fragmentation during largefile write.

From: Jayson R. King
Date: Fri May 28 2010 - 22:46:24 EST


On 05/28/2010 08:06 PM, tytso@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 02:26:57PM -0500, Jayson R. King wrote:
From: Aneesh Kumar K.V<aneesh.kumar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu Oct 16 10:10:36 2008 -0400
Subject: ext4: Fix file fragmentation during large file write.

commit 22208dedbd7626e5fc4339c417f8d24cc21f79d7 upstream.

The range_cyclic writeback mode uses the address_space writeback_index
as the start index for writeback. With delayed allocation we were
updating writeback_index wrongly resulting in highly fragmented file.
This patch reduces the number of extents reduced from 4000 to 27 for a
3GB file.

This isn't a critical bug fix either. I don't really care a whole
lot, since I don't plan to support ext4 with all of these patches but
if you haven't been doing a full set of testing with these patches,
I'd be very concerned about whether ext4 would be stable after
applying this patch series.

What sort of testing _have_ you done?

I've ran dbench for hours on an ext4 volume followed by fsck on the volume. Without the patches (particularly, just the last patch, "ext4: Implement range_cyclic..."), a typical, sustained moderate to high ext4 fs load on .27 would often lead to a deadlock. A good demonstration is to run "dbench 500" which will usually cause a deadlock in a couple of minutes.

I wasn't aware of a way to apply the deadlock fix in "ext4: Implement range_cyclic..." without also introducing this patch, since some of the blocks it touches are created by this patch.

Thanks for looking.

Rgds,

Jayson
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