[XFS updates] XFS development tree branch, for-linus, updated. v2.6.34-20236-g8016867

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  8016867 xfs: force background CIL push under sustained load
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- Log -----------------------------------------------------------------
commit 80168676ebfe4af51407d30f336d67f082d45201
Author: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date:   Fri Sep 24 18:13:44 2010 +1000

    xfs: force background CIL push under sustained load
    
    I have been seeing occasional pauses in transaction throughput up to
    30s long under heavy parallel workloads. The only notable thing was
    that the xfsaild was trying to be active during the pauses, but
    making no progress. It was running exactly 20 times a second (on the
    50ms no-progress backoff), and the number of pushbuf events was
    constant across this time as well.  IOWs, the xfsaild appeared to be
    stuck on buffers that it could not push out.
    
    Further investigation indicated that it was trying to push out inode
    buffers that were pinned and/or locked. The xfsbufd was also getting
    woken at the same frequency (by the xfsaild, no doubt) to push out
    delayed write buffers. The xfsbufd was not making any progress
    because all the buffers in the delwri queue were pinned. This scan-
    and-make-no-progress dance went one in the trace for some seconds,
    before the xfssyncd came along an issued a log force, and then
    things started going again.
    
    However, I noticed something strange about the log force - there
    were way too many IO's issued. 516 log buffers were written, to be
    exact. That added up to 129MB of log IO, which got me very
    interested because it's almost exactly 25% of the size of the log.
    He delayed logging code is suppose to aggregate the minimum of 25%
    of the log or 8MB worth of changes before flushing. That's what
    really puzzled me - why did a log force write 129MB instead of only
    8MB?
    
    Essentially what has happened is that no CIL pushes had occurred
    since the previous tail push which cleared out 25% of the log space.
    That caused all the new transactions to block because there wasn't
    log space for them, but they kick the xfsaild to push the tail.
    However, the xfsaild was not making progress because there were
    buffers it could not lock and flush, and the xfsbufd could not flush
    them because they were pinned. As a result, both the xfsaild and the
    xfsbufd could not move the tail of the log forward without the CIL
    first committing.
    
    The cause of the problem was that the background CIL push, which
    should happen when 8MB of aggregated changes have been committed, is
    being held off by the concurrent transaction commit load. The
    background push does a down_write_trylock() which will fail if there
    is a concurrent transaction commit holding the push lock in read
    mode. With 8 CPUs all doing transactions as fast as they can, there
    was enough concurrent transaction commits to hold off the background
    push until tail-pushing could no longer free log space, and the halt
    would occur.
    
    It should be noted that there is no reason why it would halt at 25%
    of log space used by a single CIL checkpoint. This bug could
    definitely violate the "no transaction should be larger than half
    the log" requirement and hence result in corruption if the system
    crashed under heavy load. This sort of bug is exactly the reason why
    delayed logging was tagged as experimental....
    
    The fix is to start blocking background pushes once the threshold
    has been exceeded. Rework the threshold calculations to keep the
    amount of log space a CIL checkpoint can use to below that of the
    AIL push threshold to avoid the problem completely.
    
    Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx>
    Reviewed-by: Alex Elder <aelder@xxxxxxx>
    Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx>

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