Neil,
Thank you for your response and my apologies for the incomplete nature of the e-mail; I didn't do all the work myself, so have collected the rest of the data to help complete the picture.
> > We're doing some testing to determine performance of MD-RAID and
> suitability for our environment.
>
> RAID0 ? RAID1? RAID5 ?
> It helps to be specific.
Sorry. Should have mentioned that we're seeing this both with RAID1 and RAID5, but not with RAID0.
>
> >
> > One particular test is giving some cause for concern:
> >
> > - Run heavy I/O to a raw partition:
> > # time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/md0p1 bs=131072 count=1000000
> > - Run single sync I/Os to the partition:
> > # time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/md0p1 bs=4096 count=1 oflag=sync
> >
> > When we run this, latency for the single I/O completion can go as
> high as 5-10 seconds
> >
> > In investigating this, it looks like the following code in
> md_write_start causes most of the slow down:
> >
> > if (mddev->in_sync) {
> > spin_lock_irq(&mddev->write_lock);
> > if (mddev->in_sync) {
> > mddev->in_sync = 0;
> > set_bit(MD_CHANGE_CLEAN, &mddev->flags);
> > set_bit(MD_CHANGE_PENDING, &mddev->flags);
> > md_wakeup_thread(mddev->thread);
> > did_change = 1;
> > }
> > spin_unlock_irq(&mddev->write_lock);
> > }
> >
> > When we change this to run about once every 10 seconds, our latency
> goes way down to a reasonable number of milliseconds.
>
> What did you change exactly.
>
> This code can be tuned by changing
> /sys/block/mdXXX/md/safe_mode_timeout
> which is measured in seconds and is the delay before marking a clean
> array
> dirty.
>
I have put the code changes at the end of this message, and I'll test the safe_mode_timeout setting.
> >
> > Questions:
> > - is the high latency for single sync I/Os something that we should
> expect?
>
> Not necessarily.
>
> > - the first time the thread runs, it was seen to take a lot longer.
> Is this due to more outstanding metadata or similar?
>
> No idea without a lot more details. What is "the thread"? How much is
> "a
> lot longer"?
>
Should have been clearer; the thread is the appropriate raid thread; i.e. raid1d or raid5d. When we put some timers in the code, without other changes, and then start the sync I/O once per second, the first sync write often takes as much as 5-10 seconds, whereas most of the others will average around 1 second with spikes from 2-5 seconds. Occasional spikes were seen up to 15 seconds to complete a write, but those are infrequent.
>
> > - is the approach to run the thread less frequently reasonable, or
> does that open up huge problems?
>
> Seeing you have said exactly what you mean by "run the thread less
> frequently", that is a very hard question to answer.
>
The change is to delay the superblock update for up to 10 seconds in the raid thread.
> NeilBrown
>
>
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Frank
> > --
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid"
> in
> > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
drivers/md$ diff -c
/kernels/linux_src-2.6.18-53.el5_64/drivers/md/raid1.c raid1.c
*** /kernels/linux_src-2.6.18-53.el5_64/drivers/md/raid1.c 2008-11-19
15:02:05.000000000 -0500
--- raid1.c 2011-03-01 14:10:21.347880000 -0500
***************
*** 750,755 ****
--- 750,756 ----
struct page **behind_pages = NULL;
const int rw = bio_data_dir(bio);
int do_barriers;
+ unsigned long start, sbsync, diska, diskb, end;
/*
* Register the new request and wait if the reconstruction
***************
*** 760,766 ****
* if barriers work.
*/
! md_write_start(mddev, bio); /* wait on superblock update early */
if (unlikely(!mddev->barriers_work && bio_barrier(bio))) {
if (rw == WRITE)
--- 761,785 ----
* if barriers work.
*/
! diska = diskb = end = start = 0;
! if(IOPRIO_PRIO_CLASS(current->ioprio) == IOPRIO_CLASS_RT)
! {
! static int count;
! static unsigned long lastmw;
!
! if(lastmw == 0)
! lastmw = jiffies;
! start = jiffies;
! if((count++ > 40) || ((jiffies - lastmw) > (HZ*10)))
! {
! md_write_start(mddev, bio); /* wait on superblock update
early */
! count = 0;
! lastmw = jiffies;
! }
! }
! else
! md_write_start(mddev, bio); /* wait on superblock update early */
! sbsync = jiffies;
if (unlikely(!mddev->barriers_work && bio_barrier(bio))) {
if (rw == WRITE)
***************
*** 920,925 ****
--- 939,948 ----
generic_make_request(bio);
#endif
+ end = jiffies;
+ //if(start != 0)
+ //printk("Raid1 make_request sbsync %ld, total
%ld\n",sbsync-start,end-start);
+
return 0;
}
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
