Skip to content
Commit 576fa348 authored by Josef Bacik's avatar Josef Bacik Committed by David Sterba
Browse files

btrfs: improve preemptive background space flushing



Currently if we ever have to flush space because we do not have enough
we allocate a ticket and attach it to the space_info, and then
systematically flush things in the filesystem that hold space
reservations until our space is reclaimed.

However this has a latency cost, we must go to sleep and wait for the
flushing to make progress before we are woken up and allowed to continue
doing our work.

In order to address that we used to kick off the async worker to flush
space preemptively, so that we could be reclaiming space hopefully
before any tasks needed to stop and wait for space to reclaim.

When I introduced the ticketed ENOSPC stuff this broke slightly in the
fact that we were using tickets to indicate if we were done flushing.
No tickets, no more flushing.  However this meant that we essentially
never preemptively flushed.  This caused a write performance regression
that Nikolay noticed in an unrelated patch that removed the committing
of the transaction during btrfs_end_transaction.

The behavior that happened pre that patch was btrfs_end_transaction()
would see that we were low on space, and it would commit the
transaction.  This was bad because in this particular case you could end
up with thousands and thousands of transactions being committed during
the 5 minute reproducer.  With the patch to remove this behavior we got
much more sane transaction commits, but we ended up slower because we
would write for a while, flush, write for a while, flush again.

To address this we need to reinstate a preemptive flushing mechanism.
However it is distinctly different from our ticketing flushing in that
it doesn't have tickets to base it's decisions on.  Instead of bolting
this logic into our existing flushing work, add another worker to handle
this preemptive flushing.  Here we will attempt to be slightly
intelligent about the things that we flushing, attempting to balance
between whichever pool is taking up the most space.

Reviewed-by: default avatarNikolay Borisov <nborisov@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJosef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
parent f00c42dd
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment