Re: [PATCHSET v3][RFC] Make background writeback not suck

[Holger Hoffstätte]

Hi,

Jens mentioned on Twitter I should post my experience here as well,
so here we go.

I've backported this series (incl. updates) to stable-4.4.x - not too
difficult, minus the NVM part which I don't need anyway - and have been
running it for the past few days without any problem whatsoever, with
GREAT success.

My use case is primarily larger amounts of stuff (transcoded movies,
finished downloads, built Gentoo packages) that gets copied from tmpfs
to SSD (or disk) and every time that happens, the system noticeably
strangles readers (desktop, interactive shell). It does not really matter
how I tune writeback via the write_expire/dirty_bytes knobs or the
scheduler (and yes, I understand how they work); lowering the writeback
limits helped a bit but the system is still overwhelmed. Jacking up
deadline's writes_starved to unreasonable levels helps a bit, but in turn
makes all writes suffer. Anything else - even tried BFQ for a while,
which has its own unrelated problems - didn't really help either.

With this patchset the buffered writeback in these situations is much
improved, and copying several GBs at once to a SATA-3 SSD (or even an
external USB-2 disk with measly 40 MB/s) doodles along in the background
like it always should have, and desktop work is not noticeably affected.

I guess the effect will be even more noticeable on slower block devices
(laptops, old SSDs or disks).

So: +1 would apply again!

cheers
Holger