Re: Read starvation by sync writes

[Dave Chinner]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 03:31:37AM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Tue 11-12-12 16:44:15, Jeff Moyer wrote:
> > Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> writes:
> > 
> > >   Hi,
> > >
> > >   I was looking into IO starvation problems where streaming sync writes (in
> > > my case from kjournald but DIO would look the same) starve reads. This is
> > > because reads happen in small chunks and until a request completes we don't
> > > start reading further (reader reads lots of small files) while writers have
> > > plenty of big requests to submit. Both processes end up fighting for IO
> > > requests and writer writes nr_batching 512 KB requests while reader reads
> > > just one 4 KB request or so. Here the effect is magnified by the fact that
> > > the drive has relatively big queue depth so it usually takes longer than
> > > BLK_BATCH_TIME to complete the read request. The net result is it takes
> > > close to two minutes to read files that can be read under a second without
> > > writer load. Without the big drive's queue depth, results are not ideal but
> > > they are bearable - it takes about 20 seconds to do the reading. And for
> > > comparison, when writer and reader are not competing for IO requests (as it
> > > happens when writes are submitted as async), it takes about 2 seconds to
> > > complete reading.
> > >
> > > Simple reproducer is:
> > >
> > > echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> > > dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/f bs=1M count=10000 &
> > > sleep 30
> > > time cat /etc/* 2>&1 >/dev/null
> > > killall dd
> > > rm /tmp/f
> > 
> > This is a buffered writer.  How does it end up that you are doing all
> > synchronous write I/O?  Also, you forgot to mention what file system you
> > were using, and which I/O scheduler.
>   So IO scheduler is CFQ, filesystem is ext3 - which is the culprit why IO
> ends up being synchronous - in ext3 in data=ordered mode kjournald often ends
> up submitting all the data to disk and it can do it as WRITE_SYNC if someone is
> waiting for transaction commit. In theory this can happen with AIO DIO
> writes or someone running fsync on a big file as well. Although when I
> tried this now, I wasn't able to create as big problem as kjournald does
> (a kernel thread submitting huge linked list of buffer heads in a tight loop
> is hard to beat ;). Hum, so maybe just adding some workaround in kjournald
> so that it's not as aggressive will solve the real world cases as well...

Maybe kjournald shouldn't be using WRITE_SYNC for those buffers? I
mean, if there is that many of them then it's really a batch
submission an dthe latency of a single buffer IO is really
irrelevant to the rate at which the buffers are flushed to disk....

Cheers,

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