Re: [RFC] ext3: per-process soft-syncing data=ordered mode

From: Al Boldi
Date: Mon Jan 28 2008 - 15:17:48 EST


Jan Kara wrote:
> On Sat 26-01-08 08:27:59, Al Boldi wrote:
> > Do you mean there is a locking problem?
>
> No, but if you write to an mmaped file, then we can find out only later
> we have dirty data in pages and we call writepage() on behalf of e.g.
> pdflush().

Ok, that's a special case, which we could code for, but doesn't seem
worthwile. In any case, child-forks should inherit its parent mode.

> > > And in case of DB, they use direct-io
> > > anyway most of the time so they don't care about journaling mode
> > > anyway.
> >
> > Testing with sqlite3 and mysql4 shows that performance drastically
> > improves with writeback writeout.
>
> And do you have the databases configured to use direct IO or not?

I don't think so, but these tests are only meant to expose the underlying
problem which needs to be fixed, while this RFC proposes a useful
workaround.

In another post Jan Kara wrote:
> Hmm, if you're willing to test patches, then you could try a debug
> patch: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=14574
> and send me the output. What kind of load do you observe problems with
> and which problems exactly?

8M-record insert into indexed db-table:
ordered writeback
sqlite3: 75m22s 8m45s
mysql4 : 23m35s 5m29s

Also, see the 'konqueror deadlocks in 2.6.22' thread.


Thanks!

--
Al

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/