Re: Disabling in-memory write cache for x86-64 in Linux II

From: Karl Kiniger
Date: Thu Oct 31 2013 - 10:25:53 EST


On Tue 131029, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Fri 25-10-13 11:15:55, Karl Kiniger wrote:
> > On Fri 131025, Linus Torvalds wrote:
....
> > Is it currently possible to somehow set above values per block device?
> Yes, to some extent. You can set /sys/block/<device>/bdi/max_ratio to
> the maximum proportion the device's dirty data can take from the total
> amount. The caveat currently is that this setting only takes effect after
> we have more than (dirty_background_ratio + dirty_ratio)/2 dirty data in
> total because that is an amount of dirty data when we start to throttle
> processes. So if the device you'd like to limit is the only one which is
> currently written to, the limiting doesn't have a big effect.

Thanks for the info - thats was I am looking for.

You are right that the limiting doesn't have a big effect right now:

on my 4x speed DVD+RW on /dev/sr0, x86_64, 4GB,
Fedora19:

max_ratio set to 100 - about 500MB buffered, sync time 2:10 min.
max_ratio set to 1 - about 330MB buffered, sync time 1:23 min.

... way too much buffering.

(measured with strace -tt -ewrite dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=1000
by looking at the timestamps).


Karl

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

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