Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug()

[Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>]

On Wed 16-09-15 11:16:21, Chris Mason wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 01:06:25PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Sun, Sep 13, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Really need to run these numbers on slower disks where block layer
> > > merging makes a difference to performance.
> > 
> > Yeah. We've seen plugging and io schedulers not make much difference
> > for high-performance flash (although I think the people who argued
> > that noop should generally be used for non-rotating media were wrong,
> > I think - the elevator ends up still being critical to merging, and
> > while merging isn't a life-or-death situation, it tends to still
> > help).
> 
> 
> Yeah, my big concern was that holding the plug longer would result in
> lower overall perf because we weren't keeping the flash busy.  So I
> started with the flash boxes to make sure we weren't regressing past 4.2
> levels at least.
> 
> I'm still worried about that, but this probably isn't the right
> benchmark to show it.  And if it's really a problem, it'll happen
> everywhere we plug and not just here.
> 
> > 
> > For rotating rust with nasty seek times, the plugging is likely to
> > make the biggest difference.
> 
> For rotating storage, I grabbed a big box and did the fs_mark run
> against 8 spindles.  These are all behind a megaraid card as jbods, so I
> flipped the card's cache to write-through.
> 
> I changed around the run a bit, making enough files for fs_mark to run
> for ~10 minutes, and I took out the sync.  I ran only xfs to cut down on
> the iterations, and after the fs_mark run, I did short 30 second run with
> blktrace in the background to capture the io sizes.
> 
> v4.2:    178K files/sec
> Chinner: 192K files/sec
> Mason:   192K files/sec
> Linus:   193K files/sec
> 
> I added support to iowatcher to graph IO size, and attached the graph.
> 
> Short version, Linus' patch still gives bigger IOs and similar perf to
> Dave's original.  I should have done the blktrace runs for 60 seconds
> instead of 30, I suspect that would even out the average sizes between
> the three patches.

Thanks for the data Chris. So I guess we are fine with what's currently in,
right?

								Honza

-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR