[PATCH 2/2] ext4: fix performance regression in ext4_writepages

Colin King colin.king at canonical.com
Mon Oct 21 18:01:28 UTC 2013


From: Ming Lei <ming.lei at canonical.com>

BugLink: http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1242812

Commit 4e7ea81db5(ext4: restructure writeback path) introduces another
performance regression on random write:

- one more page may be added to ext4 extent in
  mpage_prepare_extent_to_map, and will be submitted for I/O so
  nr_to_write will become -1 before 'done' is set

- the worse thing is that dirty pages may still be retrieved from page
  cache after nr_to_write becomes negative, so lots of small chunks
  can be submitted to block device when page writeback is catching up
  with write path, and performance is hurted.

On one arm A15 board with sata 3.0 SSD(CPU: 1.5GHz dura core, RAM:
2GB, SATA controller: 3.0Gbps), this patch can improve below test's
result from 157MB/sec to 174MB/sec(>10%):

	dd if=/dev/zero of=./z.img bs=8K count=512K

The above test is actually prototype of block write in bonnie++
utility.

This patch makes sure no more pages than nr_to_write can be added to
extent for mapping, so that nr_to_write won't become negative.

Cc: linux-ext4 at vger.kernel.org
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack at suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei at canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso at mit.edu>
(cherry picked from commit aeac589a74b91c4c07458272767e089810fbd23d
 from the dev branch of kernel/git/tytso/ext4.git)
Signed-off-by: Colin Ian King <colin.king at canonical.com>
---
 fs/ext4/inode.c | 26 +++++++++++++-------------
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/ext4/inode.c b/fs/ext4/inode.c
index f2ab232..2707855 100644
--- a/fs/ext4/inode.c
+++ b/fs/ext4/inode.c
@@ -2292,6 +2292,7 @@ static int mpage_prepare_extent_to_map(struct mpage_da_data *mpd)
 	struct address_space *mapping = mpd->inode->i_mapping;
 	struct pagevec pvec;
 	unsigned int nr_pages;
+	long left = mpd->wbc->nr_to_write;
 	pgoff_t index = mpd->first_page;
 	pgoff_t end = mpd->last_page;
 	int tag;
@@ -2327,6 +2328,17 @@ static int mpage_prepare_extent_to_map(struct mpage_da_data *mpd)
 			if (page->index > end)
 				goto out;
 
+			/*
+			 * Accumulated enough dirty pages? This doesn't apply
+			 * to WB_SYNC_ALL mode. For integrity sync we have to
+			 * keep going because someone may be concurrently
+			 * dirtying pages, and we might have synced a lot of
+			 * newly appeared dirty pages, but have not synced all
+			 * of the old dirty pages.
+			 */
+			if (mpd->wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_NONE && left <= 0)
+				goto out;
+
 			/* If we can't merge this page, we are done. */
 			if (mpd->map.m_len > 0 && mpd->next_page != page->index)
 				goto out;
@@ -2361,19 +2373,7 @@ static int mpage_prepare_extent_to_map(struct mpage_da_data *mpd)
 			if (err <= 0)
 				goto out;
 			err = 0;
-
-			/*
-			 * Accumulated enough dirty pages? This doesn't apply
-			 * to WB_SYNC_ALL mode. For integrity sync we have to
-			 * keep going because someone may be concurrently
-			 * dirtying pages, and we might have synced a lot of
-			 * newly appeared dirty pages, but have not synced all
-			 * of the old dirty pages.
-			 */
-			if (mpd->wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_NONE &&
-			    mpd->next_page - mpd->first_page >=
-							mpd->wbc->nr_to_write)
-				goto out;
+			left--;
 		}
 		pagevec_release(&pvec);
 		cond_resched();
-- 
1.8.3.2





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