On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:11:44 +1000 Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 12:17:52PM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote: > > Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from > > the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed > > soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want > > to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem > > perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky > > IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to > > clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise. > > > > This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that > > the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch > > that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward. > > Seeing as you have a list of pages for IO, perhaps they could be sorted > before issuing ->writepage on them. > > That is, while this patch issues all the IO in one hit, it doesn't > change the order in which the IO is issued - it is still issued in > LRU order. Given that they are issued in a short period of time now, > rather than across a longer scan period, it is likely that it will > not be any faster as: > > a) IO will not be started as soon, and > b) the IO scheduler still only has a small re-ordering > window and will choke just as much on random IO patterns. > > However, there is a list_sort() function that could be used to sort > the list; sorting the list of pages by mapping and page->index > within the mapping would result in all the pages on each mapping > being sent down in ascending offset order at once - exactly how the > filesystems want IO to be sent to it. Perhaps this is a simple > improvement that can be made to this code that will make a big > difference to worst case performance. > > FWIW, I did this for delayed metadata buffer writeback in XFS > recently (i.e. sort the queue of (potentially tens of thousands of) > buffers in ascending block order before dispatch) and that showed a > 10-15% reduction in seeks on simple kernel compile workloads. This > shows that if we optimise IO patterns at higher layers where the > sort window is much, much larger than in the IO scheduler, then > overall system performance improves.... Yup. But then, this all really should be done at the block layer so other io-submitting-paths can benefit from it. IOW, maybe "the sort queue is the submission queue" wasn't a good idea. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>