Re: [PATCH] xfs: improve sync behaviour in face of aggressive dirtying

Dave Chinner
2011-06-21T00:33:48Z

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 04:18:02AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> As confirmed by Wu moving to a workqueue flush as in the test patch
> below brings our performance on par with other filesystems. But there's
> a major and a minor issues with that.

I like this much better than the previous inode iterator version.

> The minor one is that we always flush all work items and not just those
> on the filesystem to be flushed. This might become an issue for lager
> systems, or when we apply a similar scheme to fsync, which has the same
> underlying issue.

For sync, I don't think it matters if we flush a few extra IO
completions on a busy system. For fsync, it could increase fsync
completion latency significantly, though I'd suggest we should
address that problem when we apply the scheme to fsync.

> The major one is that flush_workqueue only flushed work items that were
> queued before it was called, but we can requeue completions when we fail
> to get the ilock in xfs_setfilesize, which can lead to losing i_size
> updates when it happens.

Yes, I can see that will cause problems....

> I see two ways to fix this: either we implement our own workqueue
> look-alike based on the old workqueue code. This would allow flushing
> queues per-sb or even per-inode, and allow us to special case flushing
> requeues as well before returning.

No need for a look-alike. With the CMWQ infrastructure, there is no
reason why we need global workqueues anymore. The log, data and
convert wqs were global to minimise the number of per-cpu threads
XFS required to operate. CMWQ prevents the explosion of mostly idle
kernel threads, so we could move all these workqueues to per- struct
xfs_mount without undue impact.

We already have buftarg->xfs_mount and ioend->xfs_mount
backpointers, so it would be trivial to do this conversion from the
queueing/flushing POV. That immediately reduces the scope of the
flushes necessary to sync a filesystem.

I don't think we want to go to per-inode work contexts. One
possibility is that for fsync related writeback (e.g. WB_SYNC_ALL)
we could have a separate "fsync-completion" wqs that we queue
completions to rather than the more widely used data workqueue. Then
for fsync we'd only need to flush the fsync-completion workqueue
rather than the mount wide data and convert wqs, and hence we
wouldn't stall on IO completion for IO outside of fsync scope...

> Or we copy the scheme ext4 uses for fsync (it completely fails to flush
> the completion queue for plain sync), that is add a list of pending
> items to the inode, and a lock to protect it. I don't like this because
> it a) bloats the inode, b) adds a lot of complexity, and c) another lock
> to the irq I/O completion.

I'm not a great fan of that method, either. Using a separate wq
channel(s) for fsync completions seems like a much cleaner
solution to me...

Cheers,

Dave.
>
>
> Index: xfs/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_sync.c
> ===================================================================
> --- xfs.orig/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_sync.c 2011-06-17 14:16:18.442399481 +0200
> +++ xfs/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_sync.c 2011-06-18 17:55:44.864025123 +0200
> @@ -359,14 +359,16 @@ xfs_quiesce_data(
> {
> int error, error2 = 0;
>
> - /* push non-blocking */
> - xfs_sync_data(mp, 0);
> xfs_qm_sync(mp, SYNC_TRYLOCK);
> -
> - /* push and block till complete */
> - xfs_sync_data(mp, SYNC_WAIT);
> xfs_qm_sync(mp, SYNC_WAIT);
>
> + /* flush all pending size updates and unwritten extent conversions */
> + flush_workqueue(xfsconvertd_workqueue);
> + flush_workqueue(xfsdatad_workqueue);
> +
> + /* force out the newly dirtied log buffers */
> + xfs_log_force(mp, XFS_LOG_SYNC);
> +
> /* write superblock and hoover up shutdown errors */
> error = xfs_sync_fsdata(mp);
>
> Index: xfs/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_super.c
> ===================================================================
> --- xfs.orig/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_super.c 2011-06-18 17:51:05.660705925 +0200
> +++ xfs/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_super.c 2011-06-18 17:52:50.107367305 +0200
> @@ -929,45 +929,12 @@ xfs_fs_write_inode(
> * ->sync_fs call do that for thus, which reduces the number
> * of synchronous log foces dramatically.
> */
> - xfs_ioend_wait(ip);
> xfs_ilock(ip, XFS_ILOCK_SHARED);
> - if (ip->i_update_core) {
> + if (ip->i_update_core)
> error = xfs_log_inode(ip);
> - if (error)
> - goto out_unlock;
> - }
> - } else {
> - /*
> - * We make this non-blocking if the inode is contended, return
> - * EAGAIN to indicate to the caller that they did not succeed.
> - * This prevents the flush path from blocking on inodes inside
> - * another operation right now, they get caught later by
> - * xfs_sync.
> - */
> - if (!xfs_ilock_nowait(ip, XFS_ILOCK_SHARED))
> - goto out;
> -
> - if (xfs_ipincount(ip) || !xfs_iflock_nowait(ip))
> - goto out_unlock;
> -
> - /*
> - * Now we have the flush lock and the inode is not pinned, we
> - * can check if the inode is really clean as we know that
> - * there are no pending transaction completions, it is not
> - * waiting on the delayed write queue and there is no IO in
> - * progress.
> - */
> - if (xfs_inode_clean(ip)) {
> - xfs_ifunlock(ip);
> - error = 0;
> - goto out_unlock;
> - }
> - error = xfs_iflush(ip, SYNC_TRYLOCK);
> + xfs_iunlock(ip, XFS_ILOCK_SHARED);
> }
>
> - out_unlock:
> - xfs_iunlock(ip, XFS_ILOCK_SHARED);
> - out:
> /*
> * if we failed to write out the inode then mark
> * it dirty again so we'll try again later.

Hmmm - I'm wondering if there is any performance implication for
removing the background inode writeback flush here. I expect it will
change inode flush patterns, and they are pretty good right now. I
think we need to check if most inode writeback is coming from the
AIL (due to log tail pushing) or from this function before making
this change....

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com