• Howard Cochran's avatar
    writeback: Fix performance regression in wb_over_bg_thresh() · 81b76485
    Howard Cochran authored
    Commit 947e9762 ("writeback: update wb_over_bg_thresh() to use
    wb_domain aware operations") unintentionally changed this function's
    meaning from "are there more dirty pages than the background writeback
    threshold" to "are there more dirty pages than the writeback threshold".
    The background writeback threshold is typically half of the writeback
    threshold, so this had the effect of raising the number of dirty pages
    required to cause a writeback worker to perform background writeout.
    
    This can cause a very severe performance regression when a BDI uses
    BDI_CAP_STRICTLIMIT because balance_dirty_pages() and the writeback worker
    can now disagree on whether writeback should be initiated.
    
    For example, in a system having 1GB of RAM, a single spinning disk, and
    a "pass-through" FUSE filesystem mounted over the disk, application code
    mmapped a 128MB file on the disk and was randomly dirtying pages in that
    mapping.
    
    Because FUSE uses strictlimit and has a default max_ratio of only 1%,
    in balance_dirty_pages, thresh is ~200, bg_thresh is ~100, and the
    dirty_freerun_ceiling is the average of those, ~150. So, it pauses the
    dirtying processes when we have 151 dirty pages and wakes up a
    background writeback worker. But the worker tests the wrong threshold
    (200 instead of 100), so it does not initiate writeback and just
    returns.
    
    Thus, balance_dirty_pages keeps looping, sleeping and then waking up the
    worker who will do nothing. It remains stuck in this state until the few
    dirty pages that we have finally expire and we write them back for that
    reason. Then the whole process repeats, resulting in near-zero
    throughput through the FUSE BDI.
    
    The fix is to call the parameterized variant of wb_calc_thresh, so that
    the worker will do writeback if the bg_thresh is exceeded which was the
    bahavior before the referenced commit.
    
    Fixes: 947e9762 ("writeback: update wb_over_bg_thresh() to use
                         wb_domain aware operations")
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHoward Cochran <hcochran@kernelspring.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
    81b76485
page-writeback.c 83.6 KB