linux-kernel.vger.kernel.org archive mirror
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* [Regression] High latency when doing large I/O
@ 2009-01-17  0:44 Mathieu Desnoyers
  2009-01-17 16:26 ` [RFC PATCH] block: Fix bio merge induced high I/O latency Mathieu Desnoyers
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 39+ messages in thread
From: Mathieu Desnoyers @ 2009-01-17  0:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Jens Axboe, Andrea Arcangeli, akpm, Ben Gamari, ltt-dev
  Cc: linux-kernel, Jens Axboe

Hi,

A long standing I/O regression (since 2.6.18, still there today) has hit
Slashdot recently :
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/15/049201

I've taken a trace reproducing the wrong behavior on my machine and I
think it's getting us somewhere.

LTTng 0.83, kernel 2.6.28
Machine : Intel Xeon E5405 dual quad-core, 16GB ram
(just created a new block-trace.c LTTng probe which is not released yet.
It basically replaces blktrace)


echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

lttctl -C -w /tmp/trace -o channel.mm.bufnum=8 -o channel.block.bufnum=64 trace

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/newfile bs=1M count=1M
cp -ax music /tmp   (copying 1.1GB of mp3)

ls  (takes 15 seconds to get the directory listing !)

lttctl -D trace

I looked at the trace (especially at the ls surroundings), and bash is
waiting for a few seconds for I/O in the exec system call (to exec ls).

While this happens, we have dd doing lots and lots of bio_queue. There
is a bio_backmerge after each bio_queue event. This is reasonable,
because dd is writing to a contiguous file.

However, I wonder if this is not the actual problem. We have dd which
has the head request in the elevator request queue. It is progressing
steadily by plugging/unplugging the device periodically and gets its
work done. However, because requests are being dequeued at the same
rate others are being merged, I suspect it stays at the top of the queue
and does not let the other unrelated requests run.

There is a test in the blk-merge.c which makes sure that merged requests
do not get bigger than a certain size. However, if the request is
steadily dequeued, I think this test is not doing anything.

If you are interested in looking at the trace I've taken, I could
provide it.

Does that make sense ?

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F  BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 39+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2009-02-10  6:12 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 39+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2009-01-17  0:44 [Regression] High latency when doing large I/O Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-17 16:26 ` [RFC PATCH] block: Fix bio merge induced high I/O latency Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-17 16:50   ` Leon Woestenberg
2009-01-17 17:15     ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-17 19:04   ` Jens Axboe
2009-01-18 21:12     ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-18 21:27       ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-19 18:26       ` Jens Axboe
2009-01-20  2:10         ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-20  7:37           ` Jens Axboe
2009-01-20 12:28             ` Jens Axboe
2009-01-20 14:22               ` [ltt-dev] " Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-20 14:24                 ` Jens Axboe
2009-01-20 15:42                   ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-20 23:06                     ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-20 23:27               ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-21  0:25                 ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-21  4:38                   ` Ben Gamari
2009-01-21  4:54                     ` [ltt-dev] " Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-21  6:17                       ` Ben Gamari
2009-01-22 22:59                   ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-23  3:21                 ` [ltt-dev] " KOSAKI Motohiro
2009-01-23  4:03                   ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-02-10  3:36                   ` [PATCH] mm fix page writeback accounting to fix oom condition under heavy I/O Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-02-10  3:55                     ` Nick Piggin
2009-02-10  5:23                     ` Linus Torvalds
2009-02-10  5:56                       ` Nick Piggin
2009-02-10  6:12                       ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-02-02  2:08               ` [RFC PATCH] block: Fix bio merge induced high I/O latency Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-02-02 11:26                 ` Jens Axboe
2009-02-03  0:46                   ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-20 13:45             ` [ltt-dev] " Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-20 20:22             ` Ben Gamari
2009-01-20 22:23               ` Ben Gamari
2009-01-20 23:05                 ` Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-01-22  2:35               ` Ben Gamari
2009-01-19 15:45     ` Nikanth K
2009-01-19 18:23       ` Jens Axboe
2009-01-17 20:03   ` Ben Gamari

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).