[PATCH] xfs: single thread inode cache shrinking.

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2010 at 01:20:43AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> From: Dave Chinner <dchinner at redhat.com>
> 
> Having multiple CPUs trying to do the same cache shrinking work can
> be actively harmful to perforamnce when the shrinkers land in the
> same AGs.  They then lockstep on perag locks, causing contention and
> slowing each other down. Reclaim walking is sufficiently efficient
> that we do no need parallelism to make significant progress, so stop
> parallel access at the door.
> 
> Instead, keep track of the number of objects the shrinkers want
> cleaned and make sure the single running shrinker does not stop
> until it has hit the threshold that the other shrinker calls have
> built up.
> 
> This increases the cold-cache unlink rate of a 8-way parallel unlink
> workload from about 15,000 unlinks/s to 60-70,000 unlinks/s for the
> same CPU usage (~700%), resulting in the runtime for a 200M inode
> unlink workload dropping from 4h50m to just under 1 hour.

The code looks good, but long term I think this needs to be fixed
in the caller, not in every shrinker instance.


Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de>

> +		nr_to_scan += atomic64_read(&mp->m_ino_shrink_nr);
> +		atomic64_set(&mp->m_ino_shrink_nr, 0);

To be totally race free this should use atomic64_cmpxchg.