When many hundreds to thousands of threads all try to do simultaneous
transactions and the log is in a tail-pushing situation (i.e. full), we
can get multiple threads walking the AIL list and contending on the AIL
lock.
The AIL push is, in effect, a simple I/O dispatch algorithm complicated by
the ordering constraints placed on it by the transaction subsystem. It
really does not need multiple threads to push on it - even when only a
single CPU is pushing the AIL, it can push the I/O out far faster that
pretty much any disk subsystem can handle.
So, to avoid contention problems stemming from multiple list walkers, move
the list walk off into another thread and simply provide a "target" to
push to. When a thread requires a push, it sets the target and wakes the
push thread, then goes to sleep waiting for the required amount of space
to become available in the log.
This mechanism should also be a lot fairer under heavy load as the waiters
will queue in arrival order, rather than queuing in "who completed a push
first" order.
Also, by moving the pushing to a separate thread we can do more
effectively overload detection and prevention as we can keep context from
loop iteration to loop iteration. That is, we can push only part of the
list each loop and not have to loop back to the start of the list every
time we run. This should also help by reducing the number of items we try
to lock and/or push items that we cannot move.
Note that this patch is not intended to solve the inefficiencies in the
AIL structure and the associated issues with extremely large list
contents. That needs to be addresses separately; parallel access would
cause problems to any new structure as well, so I'm only aiming to isolate
the structure from unbounded parallelism here.
SGI-PV: 972759
SGI-Modid: xfs-linux-melb:xfs-kern:30371a
Signed-off-by: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Lachlan McIlroy <lachlan@sgi.com>
xfs_trans_delete_ail
xfs_trans_update_ail and xfs_trans_delete_ail get called with the AIL lock
held, and release it. Add lock annotations to these two functions so that
sparse can check callers for lock pairing, and so that sparse will not
complain about these functions since they intentionally use locks in this
manner.
SGI-PV: 954580
SGI-Modid: xfs-linux-melb:xfs-kern:26807a
Signed-off-by: Josh Triplett <josh@freedesktop.org>
Signed-off-by: Nathan Scott <nathans@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Tim Shimmin <tes@sgi.com>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
David Chinner