diff mbox

[2/3] jbd2: commit as soon as possible after log_start_commit

Message ID 1359654788-6078-3-git-send-email-tytso@mit.edu
State Accepted, archived
Headers show

Commit Message

Theodore Ts'o Jan. 31, 2013, 5:53 p.m. UTC
Once a transaction has been requested to be committed, don't let any
other handles start under that transaction, and don't allow any
pending transactions to be extended (i.e., in the case of
unlink/ftruncate).

The idea is once the transaction has had log_start_commit() called on
it, at least one thread is blocked waiting for that transaction to
commit, and over time, more and more threads will end up getting
blocked.  In order to avoid high variability in file system operations
getting blocked behind the a blocked start_this_handle(), we should
try to get the commit started as soon as possible.

Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
---
 fs/jbd2/commit.c      | 3 ++-
 fs/jbd2/journal.c     | 1 +
 fs/jbd2/transaction.c | 6 ++++--
 include/linux/jbd2.h  | 1 +
 4 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

Comments

Theodore Ts'o Feb. 4, 2013, 9:02 p.m. UTC | #1
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 12:53:07PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Once a transaction has been requested to be committed, don't let any
> other handles start under that transaction, and don't allow any
> pending transactions to be extended (i.e., in the case of
> unlink/ftruncate).
> 
> The idea is once the transaction has had log_start_commit() called on
> it, at least one thread is blocked waiting for that transaction to
> commit, and over time, more and more threads will end up getting
> blocked.  In order to avoid high variability in file system operations
> getting blocked behind the a blocked start_this_handle(), we should
> try to get the commit started as soon as possible.

I'm going to drop this patch because thanks to some performance
measurement works by Barry Marson at Red Hat, it shows that this patch
apparently makes things worse by 17% with AIM7.

At a guess, it looks like some AIM7 has enough threads competing for
the CPU that it can take a good 80ms or more before kjournald can get
scheduled, and then start locking down the transaction.  During those
80ms, a number of short transactions get in and out and make forward
progress on the benchmark.  However, there are some "long pole"
handles that will take up to 100-250ms to complete, and during that
time, nothing else can get done.  By starting to lock down the
transaction as soon as the commit is requested, instead of waiting
until the kjournald thread can be scheduled, we end up limiting
forward progress made by the quick "in and out" handles, and this far
outweighs the benefits of stopping a long-lived handle from getting
started.

It may be that after we do some work to conclusively identify what
these "long pole" handles might be --- I strongly suspect they come
from truncate/unlink calls, but we need to make sure.  If in fact they
are coming from truncate/unlink calls, it might be possible to let a
truncate processing stop its handle once it notices that we are
requesting that a journal commit should start, so we can lower the
average amount of time start_this_handle() gets blocked waiting for a
commit to complete.

Thanks again to Barry for doing the benchmarking work!  As always,
people who provide us with benchmarking support provide an absolutely
invaluable service.

					- Ted
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
diff mbox

Patch

diff --git a/fs/jbd2/commit.c b/fs/jbd2/commit.c
index 3091d42..fd2ac94 100644
--- a/fs/jbd2/commit.c
+++ b/fs/jbd2/commit.c
@@ -424,7 +424,8 @@  void jbd2_journal_commit_transaction(journal_t *journal)
 	J_ASSERT(journal->j_committing_transaction == NULL);
 
 	commit_transaction = journal->j_running_transaction;
-	J_ASSERT(commit_transaction->t_state == T_RUNNING);
+	J_ASSERT(commit_transaction->t_state == T_REQUESTED ||
+		 commit_transaction->t_state == T_RUNNING);
 
 	trace_jbd2_start_commit(journal, commit_transaction);
 	jbd_debug(1, "JBD2: starting commit of transaction %d\n",
diff --git a/fs/jbd2/journal.c b/fs/jbd2/journal.c
index 1a80e31..c22773b 100644
--- a/fs/jbd2/journal.c
+++ b/fs/jbd2/journal.c
@@ -533,6 +533,7 @@  int __jbd2_log_start_commit(journal_t *journal, tid_t target)
 		jbd_debug(1, "JBD2: requesting commit %d/%d\n",
 			  journal->j_commit_request,
 			  journal->j_commit_sequence);
+		journal->j_running_transaction->t_state = T_REQUESTED;
 		wake_up(&journal->j_wait_commit);
 		return 1;
 	} else if (!tid_geq(journal->j_commit_request, target))
diff --git a/fs/jbd2/transaction.c b/fs/jbd2/transaction.c
index df9f297..6daff29 100644
--- a/fs/jbd2/transaction.c
+++ b/fs/jbd2/transaction.c
@@ -224,7 +224,8 @@  repeat:
 	 * If the current transaction is locked down for commit, wait for the
 	 * lock to be released.
 	 */
-	if (transaction->t_state == T_LOCKED) {
+	if ((transaction->t_state == T_LOCKED) ||
+	    (transaction->t_state == T_REQUESTED)) {
 		DEFINE_WAIT(wait);
 
 		prepare_to_wait(&journal->j_wait_transaction_locked,
@@ -2179,7 +2180,8 @@  void __jbd2_journal_refile_buffer(struct journal_head *jh)
 	else
 		jlist = BJ_Reserved;
 	__jbd2_journal_file_buffer(jh, jh->b_transaction, jlist);
-	J_ASSERT_JH(jh, jh->b_transaction->t_state == T_RUNNING);
+	J_ASSERT_JH(jh, (jh->b_transaction->t_state == T_RUNNING ||
+			 jh->b_transaction->t_state == T_REQUESTED));
 
 	if (was_dirty)
 		set_buffer_jbddirty(bh);
diff --git a/include/linux/jbd2.h b/include/linux/jbd2.h
index e30b663..920a8d0 100644
--- a/include/linux/jbd2.h
+++ b/include/linux/jbd2.h
@@ -493,6 +493,7 @@  struct transaction_s
 	 */
 	enum {
 		T_RUNNING,
+		T_REQUESTED,
 		T_LOCKED,
 		T_FLUSH,
 		T_COMMIT,