On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 02:56:32AM +0800, Jan Kara wrote: > On Thu 24-02-11 23:25:09, Wu Fengguang wrote: > > The bdi base throttle bandwidth is updated based on three class of > > parameters. > > > > (1) level of dirty pages > > > > We try to avoid updating the base bandwidth whenever possible. The > > main update criteria are based on the level of dirty pages, when > > - the dirty pages are nearby the up or low control scope, or > > - the dirty pages are departing from the global/bdi dirty goals > > it's time to update the base bandwidth. > > > > Because the dirty pages are fluctuating steadily, we try to avoid > > disturbing the base bandwidth when the smoothed number of dirty pages > > is within (write bandwidth / 8) distance to the goal, based on the > > fact that fluctuations are typically bounded by the write bandwidth. > > > > (2) the position bandwidth > > > > The position bandwidth is equal to the base bandwidth if the dirty > > number is equal to the dirty goal, and will be scaled up/down when > > the dirty pages grow larger than or drop below the goal. > > > > When it's decided to update the base bandwidth, the delta between > > base bandwidth and position bandwidth will be calculated. The delta > > value will be scaled down at least 8 times, and the smaller delta > > value, the more it will be shrank. It's then added to the base > > bandwidth. In this way, the base bandwidth will adapt to the position > > bandwidth fast when there are large gaps, and remain stable when the > > gap is small enough. > > > > The delta is scaled down considerably because the position bandwidth > > is not very reliable. It fluctuates sharply when the dirty pages hit > > the up/low limits. And it takes time for the dirty pages to return to > > the goal even when the base bandwidth has be adjusted to the right > > value. So if tracking the position bandwidth closely, the base > > bandwidth could be overshot. > > > > (3) the reference bandwidth > > > > It's the theoretic base bandwidth! I take time to calculate it as a > > reference value of base bandwidth to eliminate the fast-convergence > > vs. steady-state-stability dilemma in pure position based control. > > It would be optimal control if used directly, however the reference > > bandwidth is not directly used as the base bandwidth because the > > numbers for calculating it are all fluctuating, and it's not > > acceptable for the base bandwidth to fluctuate in the plateau state. > > So the roughly-accurate calculated value is now used as a very useful > > double limit when updating the base bandwidth. > > > > Now you should be able to understand the information rich > > balance_dirty_pages-pages.png graph. Here are two nice ones: > > > > http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/wfg/writeback/dirty-throttling-v6/4G-60%25/btrfs-16dd-1M-8p-3927M-60%-2.6.38-rc6-dt6+-2011-02-24-23-14/balance_dirty_pages-pages.png > > > > http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/wfg/writeback/dirty-throttling-v6/10HDD-JBOD-6G-6%25/xfs-1dd-1M-16p-5904M-6%25-2.6.38-rc5-dt6+-2011-02-21-20-00/balance_dirty_pages-pages.png > Thanks for the update on your patch series :). As you probably noted, > I've created patches which implement IO-less balance_dirty_pages() > differently so we have two implementations to compare (which is a good > thing I believe). The question is how to do the comparison... Yeah :) > I have implemented comments, Peter had to my patches and I have finished > scripts for gathering mm statistics and processing trace output and > plotting them. Looking at your test scripts I can probably use some > of your workloads as mine are currently simpler. Currently I have some > simple dd tests running, I'll run something over NFS, SATA+USB and > hopefully several SATA drives next week. The tests are pretty time consuming. It will help to reuse test scripts for saving time and for ease of comparison. > The question is how to compare results? Any idea? Obvious metrics are > overall throughput and fairness for IO bound tasks. But then there are I guess there will be little difference in throughput, as long as the iostat output all have 100% disk util and full IO size. As for faireness, I have the "ls-files" output for comparing the file size created by each dd task. For example, wfg ~/bee% cat xfs-4dd-1M-8p-970M-20%-2.6.38-rc6-dt6+-2011-02-25-21-55/ls-files 131 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2783969280 Feb 25 21:58 /fs/sda7/zero-1 132 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2772434944 Feb 25 21:58 /fs/sda7/zero-2 133 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2733637632 Feb 25 21:58 /fs/sda7/zero-3 134 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2735734784 Feb 25 21:58 /fs/sda7/zero-4 > more subtle things like how the algorithm behaves for tasks that are not IO > bound for most of the time (or do less IO). Any good metrics here? More > things we could compare? For non IO bound tasks, there are fio job files that do different dirty rates. I have not run them though, as the bandwidth based algorithm obviously assigns higher bandwidth to light dirtiers :) Thanks, Fengguang -- 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/ . 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