Re: [PATCH 8/8] vm: Add an tuning knob for vm.max_writeback_mb

From: Artem Bityutskiy
Date: Tue Sep 08 2009 - 06:39:27 EST


Hi,

On 09/08/2009 12:23 PM, Jens Axboe wrote:
From: Theodore Ts'o<tytso@xxxxxxx>

Originally, MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES was hard-coded to 1024 because of a
concern of not holding I_SYNC for too long. (At least, that was the
comment previously.) This doesn't make sense now because the only
time we wait for I_SYNC is if we are calling sync or fsync, and in
that case we need to write out all of the data anyway. Previously
there may have been other code paths that waited on I_SYNC, but not
any more.

According to Christoph, the current writeback size is way too small,
and XFS had a hack that bumped out nr_to_write to four times the value
sent by the VM to be able to saturate medium-sized RAID arrays. This
value was also problematic for ext4 as well, as it caused large files
to be come interleaved on disk by in 8 megabyte chunks (we bumped up
the nr_to_write by a factor of two).

So, in this patch, we make the MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES a tunable,
max_writeback_mb, and set it to a default value of 128 megabytes.

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13930

Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o"<tytso@xxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe<jens.axboe@xxxxxxxxxx>

Would be nice to update doc files like

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt

as well.

--
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (ÐÑÑÑÐ ÐÐÑÑÑÐÐÐ)
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