• Dave Chinner's avatar
    xfs: CIL work is serialised, not pipelined · 39823d0f
    Dave Chinner authored
    Because we use a single work structure attached to the CIL rather
    than the CIL context, we can only queue a single work item at a
    time. This results in the CIL being single threaded and limits
    performance when it becomes CPU bound.
    
    The design of the CIL is that it is pipelined and multiple commits
    can be running concurrently, but the way the work is currently
    implemented means that it is not pipelining as it was intended. The
    critical work to switch the CIL context can take a few milliseconds
    to run, but the rest of the CIL context flush can take hundreds of
    milliseconds to complete. The context switching is the serialisation
    point of the CIL, once the context has been switched the rest of the
    context push can run asynchrnously with all other context pushes.
    
    Hence we can move the work to the CIL context so that we can run
    multiple CIL pushes at the same time and spread the majority of
    the work out over multiple CPUs. We can keep the per-cpu CIL commit
    state on the CIL rather than the context, because the context is
    pinned to the CIL until the switch is done and we aggregate and
    drain the per-cpu state held on the CIL during the context switch.
    
    However, because we no longer serialise the CIL work, we can have
    effectively unlimited CIL pushes in progress. We don't want to do
    this - not only does it create contention on the iclogs and the
    state machine locks, we can run the log right out of space with
    outstanding pushes. Instead, limit the work concurrency to 4
    concurrent works being processed at a time. This is enough
    concurrency to remove the CIL from being a CPU bound bottleneck but
    not enough to create new contention points or unbound concurrency
    issues.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarDarrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDarrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
    39823d0f
xfs_log_cil.c 46.5 KB