page fault scalability (ext3, ext4, xfs)

[Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We talked a little about this issue in this thread:

        http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=137573185419275&w=2

but I figured I'd follow up with a full comparison.  ext4 is about 20%
slower in handling write page faults than ext3.  xfs is about 30% slower
than ext3.  I'm running on an 8-socket / 80-core / 160-thread system.
Test case is this:

        
https://github.com/antonblanchard/will-it-scale/blob/master/tests/page_fault3.c

It's a little easier to look at the trends as you grow the number of
processes:

        
http://www.sr71.net/~dave/intel/page-fault-exts/cmp.html?1=ext3&2=ext4&3=xfs&hide=linear,threads,threads_idle,processes_idle&rollPeriod=16

I recorded and diff'd some perf data (I've still got the raw data if
anyone wants it), and the main culprit of the ext4/xfs delta looks to be
spinlock contention (or at least bouncing) in xfs_log_commit_cil().
This looks to be a known problem:

        http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2013-07/msg00110.html

Here's a brief snippet of the ext4->xfs 'perf diff'.  Note that things
like page_fault() go down in the profile because we are doing _fewer_ of
them, not because it got faster:

> # Baseline    Delta          Shared Object                                    
>       Symbol
> # ........  .......  .....................  
> ..............................................
> #
>     22.04%   -4.07%  [kernel.kallsyms]      [k] page_fault                    
>             
>      2.93%  +12.49%  [kernel.kallsyms]      [k] _raw_spin_lock                
>             
>      8.21%   -0.58%  page_fault3_processes  [.] testcase                      
>             
>      4.87%   -0.34%  [kernel.kallsyms]      [k] __set_page_dirty_buffers      
>             
>      4.07%   -0.58%  [kernel.kallsyms]      [k] mem_cgroup_update_page_stat   
>             
>      4.10%   -0.61%  [kernel.kallsyms]      [k] __block_write_begin           
>             
>      3.69%   -0.57%  [kernel.kallsyms]      [k] find_get_page                 
>             

It's a bit of a bummer that things are so much less scalable on the
newer filesystems.  I expected xfs to do a _lot_ better than it did.