Re: [PATCH 1/4] mm: fix IOCB_DONTCACHE write performance with rate-limited writeback

[Jeff Layton]

On Wed, 2026-04-01 at 22:21 -0700, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 03:10:58PM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > IOCB_DONTCACHE calls filemap_flush_range() with nr_to_write=LONG_MAX
> > on every write, which flushes all dirty pages in the written range.
> > 
> > Under concurrent writers this creates severe serialization on the
> > writeback submission path, causing throughput to collapse to ~47% of
> > buffered I/O with multi-second tail latency.  Even single-client
> > sequential writes suffer: on a 512GB file with 256GB RAM, the
> > aggressive flushing triggers dirty throttling that limits throughput
> > to 575 MB/s vs 1442 MB/s with rate-limited writeback.
> 
> I'm not sure the first how you think the first paragraph relate to
> the second.
> 

The belief is that under heavy parallel write workload on the same
inode, the writers all end up stacking up on the mapping's xa_lock.
However as Ritesh points out, I should probably confirm that with perf.
 
> > Replace the filemap_flush_range() call in generic_write_sync() with a
> > new filemap_dontcache_writeback_range() that uses two rate-limiting
> > mechanisms:
> > 
> >   1. Skip-if-busy: check mapping_tagged(PAGECACHE_TAG_WRITEBACK)
> >      before flushing.  If writeback is already in progress on the
> >      mapping, skip the flush entirely.  This eliminates writeback
> >      submission contention between concurrent writers.
> 
> Makes sense.
> 
> >   2. Proportional cap: when flushing does occur, cap nr_to_write to
> >      the number of pages just written.  This prevents any single
> >      write from triggering a large flush that would starve concurrent
> >      readers.
> 
> This doesn't make any sense at all.
> filemap_flush_range/filemap_writeback always caps the number of written
> pages to the range passed in.  What do you think is the change here?
> 

I had some earlier results that indicated that this did help. It's
possible they were bogus though. I'll recheck that and get back to you.

> > +	return filemap_writeback(mapping, start, end, WB_SYNC_NONE, &nr,
> > +			WB_REASON_BACKGROUND);
> 
> filemap_writeback only has 5 arguments in any tree I've looked at
> including linux-next.
> 

I think this was a bad merge on my part. Mea culpa. The version in the
"dontcache" branch of my tree should be correct.

Thanks for the review!
-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx>