Re: [PATCH 5/5] xfs: allocate xattr buffer on demand

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 09:35:05PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> From: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
> 
> When doing file lookups and checking for permissions, we end up in
> xfs_get_acl() to see if there are any ACLs on the inode. This
> requires and xattr lookup, and to do that we have to supply a buffer
> large enough to hold an maximum sized xattr.
> 
> On workloads were we are accessing a wide range of cache cold files
> under memory pressure (e.g. NFS fileservers) we end up spending a
> lot of time allocating the buffer. The buffer is 64k in length, so
> is a contiguous multi-page allocation, and if that then fails we
> fall back to vmalloc(). Hence the allocation here is /expensive/
> when we are looking up hundreds of thousands of files a second.
> 
> Initial numbers from a bpf trace show average time in xfs_get_acl()
> is ~32us, with ~19us of that in the memory allocation. Note these
> are average times, so there are going to be affected by the worst
> case allocations more than the common fast case...
> 
> To avoid this, we could just do a "null"  lookup to see if the ACL
> xattr exists and then only do the allocation if it exists. This,
> however, optimises the path for the "no ACL present" case at the
> expense of the "acl present" case. i.e. we can halve the time in
> xfs_get_acl() for the no acl case (i.e down to ~10-15us), but that
> then increases the ACL case by 30% (i.e. up to 40-45us).
> 
> To solve this and speed up both cases, drive the xattr buffer
> allocation into the attribute code once we know what the actual
> xattr length is. For the no-xattr case, we avoid the allocation
> completely, speeding up that case. For the common ACL case, we'll
> end up with a fast heap allocation (because it'll be smaller than a
> page), and only for the rarer "we have a remote xattr" will we have
> a multi-page allocation occur. Hence the common ACL case will be
> much faster, too.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>

Looks good,

Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>