Re: [PATCH] fs: sync: fixed performance regression

[Jan Kara]

On Thu 11-07-13 12:53:46, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Wed 10-07-13 16:12:36, Paul Taysom wrote:
> > The following commit introduced a 10x regression for
> > syncing inodes in ext4 with relatime enabled where just
> > the atime had been modified.
> > 
> >     commit 4ea425b63a3dfeb7707fc7cc7161c11a51e871ed
> >     Author: Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
> >     Date:   Tue Jul 3 16:45:34 2012 +0200
> >     vfs: Avoid unnecessary WB_SYNC_NONE writeback during sys_sync and reorder sync passes
> > 
> >     See also: http://www.kernelhub.org/?msg=93100&p=2
> > 
> > Fixed by putting back in the call to writeback_inodes_sb.
> > 
> > I'll attach the test in a reply to this e-mail.
> > 
> > The test starts by creating 512 files, syncing, reading one byte
> > from each of those files, syncing, and then deleting each file
> > and syncing. The time to do each sync is printed. The process
> > is then repeated for 1024 files and then the next power of
> > two up to 262144 files.
> > 
> > Note, when running the test, the slow down doesn't always happen
> > but most of the tests will show a slow down.
> > 
> > In response to crbug.com/240422
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Paul Taysom <taysom@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>   Thanks for report. Rather than blindly reverting the change, I'd like to
> understand why you see so huge regression. As the changelog in the patch
> says, flusher thread should be doing async writeback equivalent to the
> removed one because it gets woken via wakeup_flusher_threads(). But my
> guess is that for some reason we end up doing all the writeback from
> sync_inodes_one_sb(). I'll try to reproduce your results and investigate...
  Hum, so it must be something timing sensitive. I wasn't able to reproduce
the issue on my test machine in 4 runs of your test program. I was able to
reproduce it on my laptop on every second run of the test program but once
I've enabled some tracepoints, the issue disappeared and I didn't see it in
about 10 runs.

That being said I think that reverting my patch is just papering over the
problem. We will do the async pass over inodes twice instead of once
and thus the timing changes enough that you aren't able to observe the
problem.

I'm looking into this more...

								Honza
> > ---
> >  fs/sync.c | 7 +++++++
> >  1 file changed, 7 insertions(+)
> > 
> > diff --git a/fs/sync.c b/fs/sync.c
> > index 905f3f6..55c3316 100644
> > --- a/fs/sync.c
> > +++ b/fs/sync.c
> > @@ -73,6 +73,12 @@ static void sync_inodes_one_sb(struct super_block *sb, void *arg)
> >  		sync_inodes_sb(sb);
> >  }
> >  
> > +static void writeback_inodes_one_sb(struct super_block *sb, void *arg)
> > +{
> > +	if (!(sb->s_flags & MS_RDONLY))
> > +		writeback_inodes_sb(sb, WB_REASON_SYNC);
> > +}
> > +
> >  static void sync_fs_one_sb(struct super_block *sb, void *arg)
> >  {
> >  	if (!(sb->s_flags & MS_RDONLY) && sb->s_op->sync_fs)
> > @@ -104,6 +110,7 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE0(sync)
> >  	int nowait = 0, wait = 1;
> >  
> >  	wakeup_flusher_threads(0, WB_REASON_SYNC);
> > +	iterate_supers(writeback_inodes_one_sb, NULL);
> >  	iterate_supers(sync_inodes_one_sb, NULL);
> >  	iterate_supers(sync_fs_one_sb, &nowait);
> >  	iterate_supers(sync_fs_one_sb, &wait);
> > -- 
> > 1.8.3
> > 
> -- 
> Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
> SUSE Labs, CR
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR
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