[PATCH 03/27] xfs: use write_cache_pages for writeback clustering

[Dave Chinner]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 11:41:36PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> Christoph,
> 
> On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 05:33:05PM +0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > Johannes, Mel, Wu,
> > 
> > Dave has been stressing some XFS patches of mine that remove the XFS
> > internal writeback clustering in favour of using write_cache_pages.
> > 
> > As part of investigating the behaviour he found out that we're still
> > doing lots of I/O from the end of the LRU in kswapd.  Not only is that
> > pretty bad behaviour in general, but it also means we really can't
> > just remove the writeback clustering in writepage given how much
> > I/O is still done through that.
> > 
> > Any chance we could the writeback vs kswap behaviour sorted out a bit
> > better finally?
> 
> I once tried this approach:
> 
> http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg09202.html
> 
> It used a list structure that is not linearly scalable, however that
> part should be independently improvable when necessary.

I don't think that handing random writeback to the flusher thread is
much better than doing random writeback directly.  Yes, you added
some clustering, but I'm still don't think writing specific pages is
the best solution.

> The real problem was, it seem to not very effective in my test runs.
> I found many ->nr_pages works queued before the ->inode works, which
> effectively makes the flusher working on more dispersed pages rather
> than focusing on the dirty pages encountered in LRU reclaim.

But that's really just an implementation issue related to how you
tried to solve the problem. That could be addressed.

However, what I'm questioning is whether we should even care what
page memory reclaim wants to write - it seems to make fundamentally
bad decisions from an IO persepctive.

We have to remember that memory reclaim is doing LRU reclaim and the
flusher threads are doing "oldest first" writeback. IOWs, both are trying
to operate in the same direction (oldest to youngest) for the same
purpose.  The fundamental problem that occurs when memory reclaim
starts writing pages back from the LRU is this:

	- memory reclaim has run ahead of IO writeback -

The LRU usually looks like this:

	oldest					youngest
	+---------------+---------------+--------------+
	clean		writeback	dirty
			^		^
			|		|
			|		Where flusher will next work from
			|		Where kswapd is working from
			|
			IO submitted by flusher, waiting on completion


If memory reclaim is hitting dirty pages on the LRU, it means it has
got ahead of writeback without being throttled - it's passed over
all the pages currently under writeback and is trying to write back
pages that are *newer* than what writeback is working on. IOWs, it
starts trying to do the job of the flusher threads, and it does that
very badly.

The $100 question is ∗why is it getting ahead of writeback*?