[Summary]
Split LRU-list of unused dentries to one per superblock to avoid soft
lock up during NFS mounts and remounting of any filesystem.
Previously I posted here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/3/5/590
[Descriptions]
- background
dentry_unused is a list of dentries which are not referenced.
dentry_unused grows up when references on directories or files are
released. This list can be very long if there is huge free memory.
- the problem
When shrink_dcache_sb() is called, it scans all dentry_unused linearly
under spin_lock(), and if dentry->d_sb is differnt from given
superblock, scan next dentry. This scan costs very much if there are
many entries, and very ineffective if there are many superblocks.
IOW, When we need to shrink unused dentries on one dentry, but scans
unused dentries on all superblocks in the system. For example, we scan
500 dentries to unmount a filesystem, but scans 1,000,000 or more unused
dentries on other superblocks.
In our case , At mounting NFS*, shrink_dcache_sb() is called to shrink
unused dentries on NFS, but scans 100,000,000 unused dentries on
superblocks in the system such as local ext3 filesystems. I hear NFS
mounting took 1 min on some system in use.
* : NFS uses virtual filesystem in rpc layer, so NFS is affected by
this problem.
100,000,000 is possible number on large systems.
Per-superblock LRU of unused dentried can reduce the cost in
reasonable manner.
- How to fix
I found this problem is solved by David Chinner's "Per-superblock
unused dentry LRU lists V3"(1), so I rebase it and add some fix to
reclaim with fairness, which is in Andrew Morton's comments(2).
1) http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/5/25/318
2) http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/5/25/320
Split LRU-list of unused dentries to each superblocks. Then, NFS
mounting will check dentries under a superblock instead of all. But
this spliting will break LRU of dentry-unused. So, I've attempted to
make reclaim unused dentrins with fairness by calculate number of
dentries to scan on this sb based on following way
number of dentries to scan on this sb =
count * (number of dentries on this sb / number of dentries in the machine)
- ToDo
- I have to measuring performance number and do stress tests.
- When unmount occurs during prune_dcache(), scanning on same
superblock, It is unable to reach next superblock because it is gone
away. We restart scannig superblock from first one, it causes
unfairness of reclaim unused dentries on first superblock. But I think
this happens very rarely.
- Test Results
Result on 6GB boxes with excessive unused dentries.
Without patch:
$ cat /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state
10181835 10180203 45 0 0 0
# mount -t nfs 10.124.60.70:/work/kernel-src nfs
real 0m1.830s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m1.653s
With this patch:
$ cat /proc/sys/fs/dentry-state
10236610 10234751 45 0 0 0
# mount -t nfs 10.124.60.70:/work/kernel-src nfs
real 0m0.106s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.032s
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comments]
Signed-off-by: Kentaro Makita <k-makita@np.css.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Cc: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
da3bbdd463