Re: [PATCH 6/6] vmscan: Kick flusher threads to clean pages whenreclaim is encountering dirty pages

[Mel Gorman]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 03:06:01PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:37:00 +0100
> Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > There are a number of cases where pages get cleaned but two of concern
> > to this patch are;
> >   o When dirtying pages, processes may be throttled to clean pages if
> >     dirty_ratio is not met.
> 
> Ambiguous.  I assume you meant "if dirty_ratio is exceeded".
> 

Yes.

> >   o Pages belonging to inodes dirtied longer than
> >     dirty_writeback_centisecs get cleaned.
> > 
> > The problem for reclaim is that dirty pages can reach the end of the LRU if
> > pages are being dirtied slowly so that neither the throttling or a flusher
> > thread waking periodically cleans them.
> > 
> > Background flush is already cleaning old or expired inodes first but the
> > expire time is too far in the future at the time of page reclaim. To mitigate
> > future problems, this patch wakes flusher threads to clean 4M of data -
> > an amount that should be manageable without causing congestion in many cases.
> > 
> > Ideally, the background flushers would only be cleaning pages belonging
> > to the zone being scanned but it's not clear if this would be of benefit
> > (less IO) or not (potentially less efficient IO if an inode is scattered
> > across multiple zones).
> > 
> 
> Sigh.  We have sooo many problems with writeback and latency.  Read
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309 and weep.

You aren't joking.

> Everyone's
> running away from the issue and here we are adding code to solve some
> alleged stack-overflow problem which seems to be largely a non-problem,
> by making changes which may worsen our real problems.
> 

As it is, filesystems are beginnning to ignore writeback from direct
reclaim - such as xfs and btrfs. I'm lead to believe that ext3
effectively ignores writeback from direct reclaim although I don't have
access to code at the moment to double check (am on the road). So either
way, we are going to be facing this problem so the VM might as well be
aware of it :/

> direct-reclaim wants to write a dirty page because that page is in the
> zone which the caller wants to allcoate from!  Telling the flusher
> threads to perform generic writeback will sometimes cause them to just
> gum the disk up with pages from different zones, making it even
> harder/slower to allocate a page from the zones we're interested in,
> no?
> 

It's a possibility, but it can happen anyway if the filesystem is ignoring
writeback requests from direct reclaim. I considered passing in the zone to
flusher threads to clean nr_pages from a given zone but then worried about
getting caught by the "poor IO pattern" people and what happened if two
zones needed cleaning with a single inodes pages in both.

> If/when that happens, the problem will be rare, subtle, will take a
> long time to get reported and will take years to understand and fix and
> will probably be reported in the monster bug report which everyone's
> hiding from anyway.
> 

With the second patch reducing the number of dirty pages encountered by page
reclaim, I'm hoping there will be some impact on latency. I'll be back online
properly Tuesday and will try reproducing some of the problems in that bug
and see can I spot an underlying cause of some sort.

Thanks

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
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