On Friday May 2, cchan@outblaze.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We are observing a consistent interval of about 4 minutes at which there
> are large sustained writes to disk that causes mysqld to block and not
> respond for the entire period.
>
> We are using data=journal with a 128M journal and the filesystem is
> 150GB in size.
Yep. This is due to some lazy code in ext3.
If the journal fills up, then it flushes the whole journal before
continuing.
There are three ways to get around this problem.
1/ fix the code :-)
2/ use a bigger journal. There is a drawback with bigger journals
though as replay after a crash will take longer.
3/ Push the bdflush parameters down so that data in the journal will
be flushed out more often and the journal will not get full.
Something like:
echo 40 0 0 0 60 300 60 0 0 > /proc/sys/vm/bdflush
The 5th and 6th numbers are significant.
The defaults are 500 and 3000 (hundreths of a second) so
every 5 seconds it flushs data older than 30 seconds. If your
journal cannot hold 30 seconds of data, this is a problem.
So drop the 3000 to maybe 300 or 500 (3 or 5 seconds) and then
drop the 500 to a reasonable fraction of that (50 or so (half a
second)).
2 and 3 are complimentary. The bigger the journal, the larger the
age of flushed buffers can be.
NeilBrown
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