Re: 2.6: XFS spins up the disk very often

[Steve Lord <lord@sgi.com>]

On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 07:19, Ricardo Galli wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 	since I started with 2.5 in my laptop, I noticed that the disk with XFS was 
> spinning up continously. I checked with vmstats, and I saw I/O almost every 
> 60 seconds. They were mainly outputs, among 11 and 250 blocks each time.
> 
> I checked every process and redirected all syslogd to /dev/tty7 to be sure no 
> processes were generating the I/O. I couldn't find any.
> 
> So finally I repartitioned the disk and copied the whole system to a XFS 
> partition and to an Ext3. Then I tested both, rebooting each time and 
> changing the root fs.
> 
> With Ext3 there is no problem, the disk spins off very rapidly, but XFS kept 
> doing I/O's.
> 
> So I checked it again in 2.4.21-ac4. Although there were more XFS I/O than 
> with Ext3, they were not so frequent as in 2.6.
> 
> I also played echoing different values to /proc/sys/fs/xfs/ and 
> /proc/sys/vm/pagebuf/ files without noticeable changes.
> 
> Is it a problem in 2.6 or the /proc parameters must be fine tuned?

Hmm, I would expect one or two writes like this over a 1 to 2 minute
period after some activity, but after that it should idle down. I will
take a look.

Steve


-- 

Steve Lord                                      voice: +1-651-683-3511
Principal Engineer, Filesystem Software         email: lord@sgi.com