writeback: speed up writeback of big dirty files
After making dirty a 100M file, the normal behavior is to start the
writeback for all data after 30s delays. But sometimes the following
happens instead:
- after 30s: ~4M
- after 5s: ~4M
- after 5s: all remaining 92M
Some analyze shows that the internal io dispatch queues goes like this:
s_io s_more_io
-------------------------
1) 100M,1K 0
2) 1K 96M
3) 0 96M
1) initial state with a 100M file and a 1K file
2) 4M written, nr_to_write <= 0, so write more
3) 1K written, nr_to_write > 0, no more writes(BUG)
nr_to_write > 0 in (3) fools the upper layer to think that data have all
been written out. The big dirty file is actually still sitting in
s_more_io. We cannot simply splice s_more_io back to s_io as soon as s_io
becomes empty, and let the loop in generic_sync_sb_inodes() continue: this
may starve newly expired inodes in s_dirty. It is also not an option to
draw inodes from both s_more_io and s_dirty, an let the loop go on: this
might lead to live locks, and might also starve other superblocks in sync
time(well kupdate may still starve some superblocks, that's another bug).
We have to return when a full scan of s_io completes. So nr_to_write > 0
does not necessarily mean that "all data are written". This patch
introduces a flag writeback_control.more_io to indicate that more io should
be done. With it the big dirty file no longer has to wait for the next
kupdate invokation 5s later.
In sync_sb_inodes() we only set more_io on super_blocks we actually
visited. This avoids the interaction between two pdflush deamons.
Also in __sync_single_inode() we don't blindly keep requeuing the io if the
filesystem cannot progress. Failing to do so may lead to 100% iowait.
Tested-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Cc: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
3 files changed