Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/6] per device dirty throttling

[Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 18:47 +1100, David Chinner wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 04:57:37PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > This patch-set implements per device dirty page throttling. Which should solve
> > the problem we currently have with one device hogging the dirty limit.
> > 
> > Preliminary testing shows good results:
> 
> I just ran some higher throughput number on this patchset.
> 
> Identical 4-disk dm stripes, XFS, 4p x86_64, 16GB RAM, dirty_ratio = 5:
> 
> One dm stripe: 320MB/s
> two dm stripes: 310+315MB/s
> three dm stripes: 254+253+253MB/s (pci-x bus bound)
> 
> The three stripe test was for 100GB of data to each
> filesystem - all the writes finished with 1s of each other
> at 7m4s. Interestingly, the amount of memory in cache for
> each of these devices was almost exactly the same - about
> 5.2GB each. Looks good so far....
> 
> Hmmm - small problem - root disk (XFS) got stuck in
> balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr() after the above write test
> attempting to unmount the filesystems (i.e. umount trying
> to modify /etc/mtab got stuck and the root fs locked up)
> 
> (reboot)

Hmm, interesting, I'll look into it.

> None-identical dm stripes, XFS, run alone:
> 
> Single disk: 80MB/s
> 2 disk dm stripe: 155MB/s
> 4 disk dm stripe: 310MB/s
> 
> Combined, after some runtime:
> 
> # ls -sh /mnt/dm*/test
> 10G /mnt/dm0/test	19G /mnt/dm1/test	41G /mnt/dm2/test
> 15G /mnt/dm0/test	27G /mnt/dm1/test	52G /mnt/dm2/test
> 18G /mnt/dm0/test	32G /mnt/dm1/test	64G /mnt/dm2/test
> 24G /mnt/dm0/test	45G /mnt/dm1/test	86G /mnt/dm2/test
> 27G /mnt/dm0/test	51G /mnt/dm1/test	95G /mnt/dm2/test
> 29G /mnt/dm0/test	52G /mnt/dm1/test	97G /mnt/dm2/test
> 29G /mnt/dm0/test	54G /mnt/dm1/test	101G /mnt/dm2/test [done]
> 35G /mnt/dm0/test	65G /mnt/dm1/test	101G /mnt/dm2/test
> 38G /mnt/dm0/test	70G /mnt/dm1/test	101G /mnt/dm2/test
> 
> And so on. Final number:
> 
> Single disk: 70MB/s
> 2 disk dm stripe: 130MB/s
> 4 disk dm stripe: 260MB/s
> 
> So overall we've lost about 15-20% of the theoretical aggregate
> perfomrance, but we haven't starved any of the devices over a
> long period of time.
> 
> However, looking at vmstat for total throughput, there are periods
> of time where it appears that the fastest disk goes idle. That is,
> we drop from an aggregate of about 550MB/s to below 300MB/s for
> several seconds at a time. You can sort of see this from the file
> size output above - long term the ratios remain the same, but in the
> short term we see quite a bit of variability.

I suspect you did not apply 7/6? There is some trouble with signed vs
unsigned in the initial patch set that I tried to 'fix' by masking out
the MSB, but that doesn't work and results in 'time' getting stuck for
about half the time.

> When the fast disk completed, I saw almost the same thing, but
> this time it seems like the slow disk (i.e. ~230MB/s to ~150MB/s)
> stopped for several seconds.
> 
> I haven't really digested what the patches do,

If you have questions please ask, I'll try to write up coherent
answers :-)

>  but it's almost
> like it is throttling a device completely while it allows another
> to finish writing it's quota (underestimating bandwidth?).

Yeah, there is some lumpy-ness in BIO submission or write completions it
seems, and when that granularity (multiplied by the number of active
devices) is larger than the 'time' period over with we average
(indicated by vm_cycle_shift) very weird stuff can happen.

> (umount after writes hung again. Same root disk thing as before....)
> 
> This is looking promising, Peter. When it is more stable I'll run
> some more tests....

Thanks for the tests.

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