From: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx>
Jan Kara reported a performance regression in dbench that he
bisected down to commit bad77c375e8d ("xfs: CIL checkpoint
flushes caches unconditionally").
Whilst developing the journal flush/fua optimisations this cache was
part of, it appeared to made a significant difference to
performance. However, now that this patchset has settled and all the
correctness issues fixed, there does not appear to be any
significant performance benefit to asynchronous cache flushes.
In fact, the opposite is true on some storage types and workloads,
where additional cache flushes that can occur from fsync heavy
workloads have measurable and significant impact on overall
throughput.
Local dbench testing shows little difference on dbench runs with
sync vs async cache flushes on either fast or slow SSD storage, and
no difference in streaming concurrent async transaction workloads
like fs-mark.
Fast NVME storage.
