On Thu 11-04-13 14:35:12, Ted Tso wrote: > On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 06:04:02PM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote: > > > If we're stalling on lock_buffer(), that implies that buffer was being > > > written, and for some reason it was taking a very long time to > > > complete. > > > > > > > Yes. > > > > > It might be worthwhile to put a timestamp in struct dm_crypt_io, and > > > record the time when a particular I/O encryption/decryption is getting > > > queued to the kcryptd workqueues, and when they finally squirt out. > > > > > > > That somewhat assumes that dm_crypt was at fault which is not unreasonable > > but I was skeptical as the workload on dm_crypt was opening a maildir > > and mostly reads. > > Hmm... well, I've reviewed all of the places in the ext4 and jbd2 > layer where we call lock_buffer(), and with one exception[1] we're not > holding the the bh locked any longer than necessary. There are a few > places where we grab a spinlock or two before we can do what we need > to do and then release the lock'ed buffer head, but the only time we > hold the bh locked for long periods of time is when we submit metadata > blocks for I/O. > > [1] There is one exception in ext4_xattr_release_block() where I > believe we should move the call to unlock_buffer(bh) before the call > to ext4_free_blocks(), since we've already elevanted the bh count and > ext4_free_blocks() does not need to have the bh locked. It's not > related to any of the stalls you've repored, though, as near as I can > tell (none of the stack traces include the ext4 xattr code, and this > would only affect external extended attribute blocks). > > > Could you code which checks the hold time of lock_buffer(), measuing > from when the lock is successfully grabbed, to see if you can see if I > missed some code path in ext4 or jbd2 where the bh is locked and then > there is some call to some function which needs to block for some > random reason? What I'd suggest is putting a timestamp in buffer_head > structure, which is set by lock_buffer once it is successfully grabbed > the lock, and then in unlock_buffer(), if it is held for more than a > second or some such, to dump out the stack trace. > > Because at this point, either I'm missing something or I'm beginning > to suspect that your hard drive (or maybe something the block layer?) > is simply taking a long time to service an I/O request. Putting in > this check should be able to very quickly determine what code path > and/or which subsystem we should be focused upon. I think it might be more enlightening if Mel traced which process in which funclion is holding the buffer lock. I suspect we'll find out that the flusher thread has submitted the buffer for IO as an async write and thus it takes a long time to complete in presence of reads which have higher priority. Honza -- Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> SUSE Labs, CR -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>