From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Eric Sandeen Subject: Re: [PATCH (RESEND)] don't scan/accumulate more pages than mballoc will allocate Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2010 09:42:11 -0500 Message-ID: <4BB9F6C3.5000001@redhat.com> References: <4BB0C761.50204@redhat.com> <20100405131105.GB22104@thunk.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: ext4 development To: tytso@mit.edu Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:16972 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753668Ab0DEOmR (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Apr 2010 10:42:17 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20100405131105.GB22104@thunk.org> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: tytso@mit.edu wrote: > On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:29:37AM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote: >> This patch makes mpage_add_bh_to_extent stop the loop after we've >> accumulated 2048 pages, by setting mpd->io_done = 1; which ultimately >> causes the write_cache_pages loop to break. >> >> Repeating the test with a dirty_ratio of 80 (to leave something for >> fsync to do), I don't see huge IO performance gains, but the reduction >> in cpu usage is striking: 80% usage with stock, and 2% with the >> below patch. Instrumenting the loop in write_cache_pages clearly >> shows that we are wasting time here. >> >> It'd be better to not have a magic number of 2048 in here, so I'll >> look for a cleaner way to get this info out of mballoc; I still need >> to look at what Aneesh has in the patch queue, that might help. >> This is something we could probably put in for now, though; the 2048 >> is already enshrined in a comment in inode.c, at least. > > I wonder if a better way of fixing this is to changing > mpage_da_map_pages() to call ext4_get_blocks() multiple times. This That sounds reasonable, I'll look into writing something up and testing it a bit. Up to you whether the initial patch goes in, I know it's kind of stopgap/hacky. thanks, -Eric > should be a lot easier after we integrate mpage_da_submit_io() into > mpage_da_map_pages(). That way we can way more efficient; in a loop, > we accumulate the pages, call ext4_get_blocks(), then submit the IO > (as a single block I/O submission, instead of 4k at a time through > ext4_writepages()), and then call ext4_get_blocks() again, etc. > I'm willing to include this patch as an interim stopgap, but > eventually, I think we need to refactor and reorganize > mpage_da_map_pages() and and mpage_da_submit_IO(), and let them call > mballoc (via ext4_get_blocks) multiple times in a loop. > > Thoughts, suggestions? > > - Ted