Re: [PATCH] Add ext3 data=guarded mode

[Mike Galbraith]

On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 11:26 +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Mon 20-04-09 11:07:17, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> > All journal modes seem subject to bad throughput under heavy pressure,
> > though data=ordered seems much less likely to suffer for some reason.
> > Major difference _seems_ to be that write()+largefile induces very much
> > swap activity.

>   My rough guess is that this depends on the VM writeout behavior. In
> ordered mode, we forcibly writeout all the dirty data on a transaction
> commit which happens every 5 seconds so they don't accumulate that much.

Aha.

> In other journaling modes we don't do that and decisions about writeout
> (probably how much pdflush manages to write in background vs. how much
> VM throttles the process to do the writeback itself) cause variances in
> the run time. But this is just a guess. You could gather blktraces of
> slow and fast runs and then look if the amount of IO done by different
> processes significantly differs. If Chris has merged by improvements to
> Seekwatcher, then you could nicely visualize this (hmm, that doesn't seem
> to be the case so I'm attaching the diff and a helper script - see comments
> in the beginning of the script and command helps for usage).

Not necessary methinks.  Actually _reading_ the proggy instead of just
glancing at it...

@@ -178,7 +178,7 @@ int do_write_chunks(char *target, int *f
        unsigned long long remain = len;
        char *zeros;

-       zeros = calloc(1, len);
+       zeros = calloc(1, data);
ï
I assume that was a booboo. 

	-Mike

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