Re: [PATCH 0/11] Per-bdi writeback flusher threads v9

Frederic Weisbecker
2009-06-04T21:43:24Z

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 09:50:13PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 04 2009, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 12:07:26PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > On Thu, 4 Jun 2009 17:20:44 +0200 Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I've just tested it on UP in a single disk.
> > >
> > > I must say, I'm stunned at the amount of testing which people are
> > > performing on this patchset. Normally when someone sends out a
> > > patchset it just sort of lands with a dull thud.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure what Jens did right to make all this happen, but thanks!
> >
> >
> > I don't know how he did either. I was reading theses patches and *something*
> > pushed me to my testbox, and then I tested...
> >
> > Jens, how do you do that?
>
> Heh, not sure :-)
>
> But indeed, thanks for the testing. It looks quite interesting. I'm
> guessing it probably has to do with who ends up doing the balancing and
> that the flusher threads block, it may change the picture a bit. So it
> may just be that it'll require a few vm tweaks. I'll definitely look
> into it and try and reproduce your results.
>
> Did you run it a 2nd time on each drive and check if the results were
> (approximately) consistent on the two drives?

Another snapshot, only with bdi-writeback this time.

http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/frederic/dbench2.pdf

Looks like the same effect but the difference is more quiet this time.

I guess there is a good bunch of entropy inside, so it's hard to tell :)
I'll test with no op scheduler.