Re: Unresponiveness of 2.4.16

From: Marcelo Tosatti (marcelo@conectiva.com.br)
Date: Wed Nov 28 2001 - 15:04:41 EST


On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Andreas Dilger wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 28, 2001 12:31 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > write-cluster.patch
> > > ext2 metadata prereading and various other hacks which
> > > prevent writes from stumbling over reads, and thus ruining
> > > write clustering. This patch is in the early prototype stage
> >
> > Shouldn't the ext2_inode_preread() code use "ll_rw_block(READ_AHEAD,...)"
> > just to be proper?
> >
>
> Yes, especially now the request queues are shorter than they have
> historically been. READA also needs to be propagated through the
> pagecache readhead, which may prove tricky.
>
> But so little code is actually using READA at this stage that I didn't
> bother - I first need to go through those paths and make sure that they
> are in fact complete, working and useful...

I've done some experiments in the past which have shown that doing this
will cause us to almost _never_ do readahead on IO intensive workloads,
which ended up decreasing performance instead increasing it.

Please make sure to extensively test the propagation of READA through the
pagecache when you do so...

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 30 2001 - 21:00:32 EST