Re: [git pull] more vfs fixes for final

From: Simon Kirby
Date: Fri Mar 11 2011 - 20:09:36 EST


On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 04:35:19PM -0500, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 01:09:38PM -0800, Simon Kirby wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 11:58:56AM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> >
> > > commit d891eedbc3b1b0fade8a9ce60cc0eba1cccb59e5
> > > Author: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > Date: Tue Jan 18 15:45:09 2011 -0500
> > >
> > > fs/dcache: allow d_obtain_alias() to return unhashed dentries
> >
> > Hmm, I was hoping this or something recently would fix nfs_inode_cache
> > growing forever and flush processes taking lots of system time since
> > 2.6.36. For example:
> >
> > OBJS ACTIVE USE OBJ SIZE SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
> > 3457486 3454365 99% 0.95K 105601 33 3379232K nfs_inode_cache
> > 469638 248761 52% 0.10K 12042 39 48168K buffer_head
> > 243712 216348 88% 0.02K 952 256 3808K kmalloc-16
> > 232785 202185 86% 0.19K 11085 21 44340K dentry
> > 149696 54633 36% 0.06K 2339 64 9356K kmalloc-64
> > 115976 106806 92% 0.55K 4142 28 66272K radix_tree_node
> > 76064 45680 60% 0.12K 2377 32 9508K kmalloc-128
> > 62336 53427 85% 0.03K 487 128 1948K kmalloc-32
> > 41958 41250 98% 0.75K 1998 21 31968K ext3_inode_cache
> >
> > This clears them all, similar to what you posted:
> >
> > echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> > sync
> > echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> >
> > ...but 2.6.38-rc8 still doesn't seem to fix it.
> >
> > http://0x.ca/sim/ref/2.6.37/cpu3_nfs.png
> > http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-nfs/msg18212.html
> >
> > Any ideas? This started with 2.6.36.
>
> Do you have NFSv4 clients that are doing locking? Then it's probably
> 0997b17360 and 529d7b2a7f on the for-2.6.39 branch at:
>
> git://linux-nfs.org/~bfields/linux.git for-2.6.39
>
> Let me know if not.

Yes, but when this started, it was all NFSv3. I tried NFSv4 to see if
it made any different (no, other than more I/O wait due to idmapd and
flock(LOCK_EX) breaking on a file opened O_RDONLY, which works locally
and on NFSv3 -- fixed by changing to open(O_RDWR) in my code), but
otherwise NFSv3 and NFSv4 look pretty much the same and "leak" at the
same rate.

Actually, I only changed the mount where it writes the log results, and
not where it reads them from (a bunch of NFSv3 mounts that will take a
lot more work to make NFSv4 since they currently run without libnss-mysql
set up), so I haven't actually tested to see if it happens with purely
NFSv4 mounts.

Anyway, it's locking on one file only, and it was purely for reducing
writeback thrashing, so I could try without it if you think it might be
related, but it all started without NFSv4. All this thing does is read a
bunch of log files, crunch them into reports, and write them to another
mount point, all run from xargs -P. Pretty basic readdir, read, write,
unlink...not anything exotic.

Simon-
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