Re: regression: 100% io-wait with 2.6.24-rcX

Mel Gorman
2008-01-18T16:01:37Z

On (18/01/08 00:19), Martin Knoblauch didst pronounce:
> > > The effect is defintely depending on the IO hardware.
> > > performed the same tests
> > > on a different box with an AACRAID controller and there things
> > > look different.
> >
> > I take it different also means it does not show this odd performance
> > behaviour and is similar whether the patch is applied or not?
> >
>
> Here are the numbers (MB/s) from the AACRAID box, after a fresh boot:
>
> Test 2.6.19.2 2.6.24-rc6 2.6.24-rc6-81eabcbe0b991ddef5216f30ae91c4b226d54b6d
> dd1 325 350 290
> dd1-dir 180 160 160
> dd2 2x 90 2x113 2x110
> dd2-dir 2x120 2x 92 2x 93
> dd3 3x 54 3x 70 3x 70
> dd3-dir 3x 83 3x 64 3x 64
> mix3 55,2x 30 400,2x 25 310,2x 25
>
> What we are seing here is that:
>
> a) DIRECT IO takes a much bigger hit (2.6.19 vs. 2.6.24) on this IO system compared to the CCISS box
> b) Reverting your patch hurts single stream

Right, and this is consistent with other complaints about the PFN of the
page mattering to some hardware.

> c) dual/triple stream are not affected by your patch and are improved over 2.6.19

I am not very surprised. The callers to the page allocator are probably
making no special effort to get a batch of pages in PFN-order. They are just
assuming that subsequent calls give contiguous pages. With two or more
threads involved, there will not be a correlation between physical pages
and what is on disk any more.

> d) the mix3 performance is improved compared to 2.6.19.
> d1) reverting your patch hurts the local-disk part of mix3
> e) the AACRAID setup is definitely faster than the CCISS.
>
> So, on this box your patch is definitely needed to get the pre-2.6.24 performance
> when writing a single big file.
>
> Actually things on the CCISS box might be even more complicated. I forgot the fact
> that on that box we have ext2/LVM/DM/Hardware, while on the AACRAID box we have
> ext2/Hardware. Do you think that the LVM/MD are sensitive to the page order/coloring?
>

I don't have enough experience with LVM setups to make an intelligent
guess.

> Anyway: does your patch only address this performance issue, or are there also
> data integrity concerns without it?

Performance issue only. There are no data integrity concerns with that
patch.

> I may consider reverting the patch for my
> production environment. It really helps two thirds of my boxes big time, while it does
> not hurt the other third that much :-)
>

That is certainly an option.

> > >
> > > I can certainly stress the box before doing the tests. Please
> > > define "many" for the kernel compiles :-)
> > >
> >
> > With 8GiB of RAM, try making 24 copies of the kernel and compiling them
> > all simultaneously. Running that for for 20-30 minutes should be enough
> >
> to randomise the freelists affecting what color of page is used for the
> > dd test.
> >
>
> ouch :-) OK, I will try that.
>

Thanks.

--
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab