Hi Frank, Consider using bigalloc feature (requires reformat), preallocate space with fallocate and use O_DIRECT for reads/writes. However, 188k writes are too small for good throughput with O_DIRECT. You might also want to adjust max_sectors_kb to something larger than 512k. We're doing 6in+6out 20Mbps streams just fine. Regards, Andrei. On 17.05.2013 09:51, frankcmoeller@xxxxxxxx wrote: > Hi, > > we're using ext4 on satellite boxes (e.g. XTrend et9200) with mounted harddisks. The receiver uses linux with kernel version 3.8.7. Some users (like me) have problems with the first recording right after boot. Most of them have big partitions(1-2TB) and high disk usage (over 50%). The application signals in this case a buffer overflow (the buffer is 4 MB big). We found out, that one of the first writes after boot or remount is very slow. I have debugged it. The testcase was a umount then mount and then a write of 64MB data to the disk: > The problem is the initialization of the buffer cache which takes very long(ext4_mb_init_group in ext4_mb_good_group procedure). In my case it loads around 1300 groups per second (with the patch which avoids loading full groups). My disk is at the beginning quite full, so it needs to read around 8200 groups to find a "good" one. This takes over 6 seconds. Here is the output: > May 10 02:06:15 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator start time: 4284161251798 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before for group loop cr: 0 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 0 time: 4284161318465 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after allocate buffer_heads; time: 4284161355983 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_read_block_bitmap_nowait time: 4284161440835 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_wait_block_bitmap time: 4284167134687 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after allocate buffer_heads; time: 4284167180243 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_read_block_bitmap_nowait time: 4284167198909 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_wait_block_bitmap time: 4284167212835 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 1 time: 4284167260724 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 2 time: 4284167276576 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 3 time: 4284167291205 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 4 time: 4284167305798 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 5 time: 4284167320280 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 6 time: 4284167334835 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 7 time: 4284167349317 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8 time: 4284167363909 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 9 time: 4284167378391 > May 10 02:06:31 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 10 time: 4284167392872 > ... > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8240 time: 4290297430389 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after allocate buffer_heads; time: 4290297464612 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_read_block_bitmap_nowait time: 4290297521464 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_wait_block_bitmap time: 4290310304019 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after allocate buffer_heads; time: 4290310346352 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_read_block_bitmap_nowait time: 4290310363908 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_wait_block_bitmap time: 4290310377834 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8241 time: 4290310425945 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8242 time: 4290310443241 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8243 time: 4290310458352 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8244 time: 4290310473204 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8245 time: 4290310488056 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8246 time: 4290310503167 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8247 time: 4290310517982 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8248 time: 4290310533093 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8249 time: 4290310547945 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8250 time: 4290310562797 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8251 time: 4290310577871 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8252 time: 4290310592945 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8253 time: 4290310608019 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8254 time: 4290310622871 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator before good group; group: 8255 time: 4290310637723 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after allocate buffer_heads; time: 4290310668278 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_read_block_bitmap_nowait time: 4290310739464 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_wait_block_bitmap time: 4290310979093 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after allocate buffer_heads; time: 4290311058093 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_read_block_bitmap_nowait time: 4290311077538 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_init_cache after ext4_wait_block_bitmap time: 4290311091167 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator after good group; group: 8255 time: 4290311137649 > May 10 02:06:37 et9x00 user.info kernel: EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_mb_regular_allocator end time: 4290311168501 > > Don't be surprised I couldn't activate kernel tracing on the satellite box. Perhaps because of 2 closed source kernel modules which we need to use. I have added some ext4_msg statements in mballoc.c. > > If I understood right, this can also happen hours after first write, because there might be some space at the beginning of the harddisk and if it is consumed the initialization of the buffer cache proceeds... > For debugging I tested with a 64MB write, which took more than 7 seconds (the subsequently writes were much faster): > root@et9x00:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/hdd/test.6434 bs=64M count=1 > 1+0 records in > 1+0 records out > 67108864 bytes (64.0MB) copied, 7.379178 seconds, 8.7MB/s > > The application writes 188KB blocks to disk. And there we also see after some quick writes several seconds taking writes after boot or mount. > > So we have real time data (up to 2 MB per second per recording) which needs to be written within max 2 or 3 seconds (depending on the bitrate of the channel). We cannot have very big buffer in the application, because of limited resources, which we cannot change. > > So my questions: > - What can we do to avoid this (at best with no reformating)? > - Why do you throw away buffer cache and don't store it on disk during umount? The initialization of the buffer cache is quite awful for application which need a specific write throughput. > - A workaround would be to read whole /proc/.../mb_groups file right after every mount. Correct? > - I can try to add a mount option to initialize the cache at mount time. Would you be interested in such a patch? > - I can see (see debug output) that the call of ext4_wait_block_bitmap in mballoc.c line 848 takes during buffer cache initialization the longest time (some 1/100 of a second). Can this be improved? > > Regards, > Frank > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
