ext4: Speedup WB_SYNC_ALL pass called from sync(2)
When doing filesystem wide sync, there's no need to force transaction commit (or synchronously write inode buffer) separately for each inode because ext4_sync_fs() takes care of forcing commit at the end (VFS takes care of flushing buffer cache, respectively). Most of the time this slowness doesn't manifest because previous WB_SYNC_NONE writeback doesn't leave much to write but when there are processes aggressively creating new files and several filesystems to sync, the sync slowness can be noticeable. In the following test script sync(1) takes around 6 minutes when there are two ext4 filesystems mounted on a standard SATA drive. After this patch sync takes a couple of seconds so we have about two orders of magnitude improvement. function run_writers { for (( i = 0; i < 10; i++ )); do mkdir $1/dir$i for (( j = 0; j < 40000; j++ )); do dd if=/dev/zero of=$1/dir$i/$j bs=4k count=4 &>/dev/null done & done } for dir in "$@"; do run_writers $dir done sleep 40 time sync Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
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