Chris Mason wrote: > On Wednesday 30 January 2008, Al Boldi wrote: > > Jan Kara wrote: > > > > Chris Snook wrote: > > > > > Al Boldi wrote: > > > > > > This RFC proposes to introduce a tunable which allows to disable > > > > > > fsync and changes ordered into writeback writeout on a > > > > > > per-process basis like this: > > > > > > > > > > > > echo 1 > /proc/`pidof process`/softsync > > > > > > > > > > This is basically a kernel workaround for stupid app behavior. > > > > > > > > Exactly right to some extent, but don't forget the underlying > > > > data=ordered starvation problem, which looks like a genuinely deep > > > > problem maybe related to blockIO. > > > > > > It is a problem with the way how ext3 does fsync (at least that's > > > what we ended up with in that konqueror problem)... It has to flush > > > the current transaction which means that app doing fsync() has to wait > > > till all dirty data of all files on the filesystem are written (if we > > > are in ordered mode). And that takes quite some time... There are > > > possibilities how to avoid that but especially with freshly created > > > files, it's tough and I don't see a way how to do it without some > > > fundamental changes to JBD. > > > > Ok, but keep in mind that this starvation occurs even in the absence of > > fsync, as the benchmarks show. > > > > And, a quick test of successive 1sec delayed syncs shows no hangs until > > about 1 minute (~180mb) of db-writeout activity, when the sync abruptly > > hangs for minutes on end, and io-wait shows almost 100%. > > Do you see this on older kernels as well? The first thing we need to > understand is if this particular stall is new. 2.6.24,22,19 and 2.4.32 show the same problem. Thanks! -- Al - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
