Re: [PATCH 02/35] writeback: safety margin for bdi stat error

Jan Kara
2011-01-12T21:59:57Z

On Mon 13-12-10 22:46:48, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> In a simple dd test on a 8p system with "mem=256M", I find all light
> dirtier tasks on the root fs are get heavily throttled. That happens
> because the global limit is exceeded. It's unbelievable at first sight,
> because the test fs doing the heavy dd is under its bdi limit. After
> doing some tracing, it's discovered that
>
> bdi_dirty < bdi_dirty_limit() < global_dirty_limit() < nr_dirty
^^ bdi_dirty is the number of pages dirtied on BDI? I.e.
bdi_nr_reclaimable + bdi_nr_writeback?

> So the root cause is, the bdi_dirty is well under the global nr_dirty
> due to accounting errors. This can be fixed by using bdi_stat_sum(),
So which statistic had the big error? I'd just like to understand
this (and how come your patch improves the situation)...

> however that's costly on large NUMA machines. So do a less costly fix
> of lowering the bdi limit, so that the accounting errors won't lead to
> the absurd situation "global limit exceeded but bdi limit not exceeded".
>
> This provides guarantee when there is only 1 heavily dirtied bdi, and
> works by opportunity for 2+ heavy dirtied bdi's (hopefully they won't
> reach big error _and_ exceed their bdi limit at the same time).
>
...
> @@ -458,6 +464,14 @@ unsigned long bdi_dirty_limit(struct bac
> long numerator, denominator;
>
> /*
> + * try to prevent "global limit exceeded but bdi limit not exceeded"
> + */
> + if (likely(dirty > bdi_stat_error(bdi)))
> + dirty -= bdi_stat_error(bdi);
> + else
> + return 0;
> +
Ugh, so if by any chance global_dirty_limit() <= bdi_stat_error(bdi), you
will limit number of unreclaimable pages for that bdi 0? Why?

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