Re: ext4 data=writeback performs worse than data=ordered now

Wu Fengguang
2011-12-15T01:10:17Z

> I found sometimes one disk hasn't any request inflight, but we can't
> send request to the disk, because the scsi host's resource (the queue
> depth) is used out, looks we send too many requests from other disks and
> leave some disks starved. The resource imbalance in scsi isn't a new
> problem, even 3.1 has such issue, so I'd think writeback introduces new
> imbalance between the 12 disks. In fact, if I limit disk's queue depth
> to 10, in this way the 12 disks will not impact each other in scsi
> layer, the performance regression fully disappears for both writeback
> and order mode.

I observe similar issue in MD. The default

q->nr_requests = BLKDEV_MAX_RQ;

is too small for large arrays, and I end up doing

echo 1280 > /sys/block/md0/queue/nr_requests

in my tests.

Thanks,
Fengguang