[Cluster-devel] RFC: growing files more than 4k at the time while writing

Steven Whitehouse swhiteho at redhat.com
Thu Aug 16 14:03:18 UTC 2018


Hi,


On 16/08/18 13:56, Stefano Panella wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am looking at gfs2 performance when there is Virtual Machine workload and have some questions:
>
> If we have a system where every host is writing sequentially, o_direct, 512k  at the time, 20 files or more each host, we can see very high CPU usage and lot of contention on resource groups.
> In particular we can see that for every gfs2_file_write_iter (512k) there are many gfs2_write_begin and many gfs2_inplace_reserve (4k each).
When you extend a file with o_direct, then gfs2 uses a buffered write to 
complete that I/O. It is only truely o_direct for in-place writes. This 
is fairly common for filesystems, and normally you'd call fallocate to 
extend the file and then write into it with o_direct once it has been 
extended.

>
> I have attempted to mitigate this problem with the following patch and I would like to know your opinion.
>
> Does the patch look correct?
> Is there any more lock to be taken?
> Is it fundamentally wrong calling fallocate from write_iter?
This is not the right solution. You can call fallocate from your 
application if that is what is required. There is no need to call it 
from the kernel.

>
> When the following patch is applied with allocation_quantum = 16 MB basically we can max out few 10Gb links when writing and growing many files from different hosts so a similar mechanism would be very usefull to improve performance but I am not sure it has been implemented in the best way (probably not).
>
> Thanks a lot for all your help,
Since you are doing streaming writes to these files, you may see 
significant improvement in performance with the iomap changes that have 
just been merged upstream in the current merge window,

Steve.

>
> Stefano
>
> commit cf7824f08a431ad5a2e1e2d20499734f0632b12d
> Author: Stefano Panella <stefano.panella at citrix.com>
> Date:   Wed Aug 15 15:32:52 2018 +0000
>
>      Add allocation_quantum to gfs2_write_iter
>
>      On gfs2_write_iter we know the size of the write and how much
>      more space we would need to complete the write but this information
>      is not used and instead all the space needed will be allocate 4kB
>      at the time from gfs2_write_begin. This behaviour is causing a massive
>      contention while growing hundereds of files from different nodes.
>
>      In an attempt to mitigate this problem a module parameter has been
>      added to configure a different allocation behaviour in gfs2_write_iter.
>
>      The module parameter is called gfs2_allocation_quantum and it has got
>      the following semantic:
>
>        -1: will not attempt to fallocate and not change the existing behaviour
>         0: (default) will only fallocate without zeroing the part which is
>            going to be written any way
>        >0: same as zero but will round up the allocation size by this value
>            interpreted as as kBytes. This can remove substantially the cost
>            of growing files at the expense of wasting more storage and having
>            part of the fallocated region not initialised. This option is meant
>            to help the use case where every file is backing up a Virtual Machine
>            qcow2 image for example where the file will grow linearly all the
>            time and is potentially going to be huge. For the fact that the newly
>            allocated region is uninitialised the image format wil make sure that
>            the guest will never see that.
>
>      The way the change has been implemented was to refactor the gfs2_fallocate
>      function to get also a flags parameter which can be set to include
>      GFS2_FALLOCATE_NO_ZERO in order to avoid writing zeros to the allocated
>      region. In case of the fallocate called from gfs2_write_iter the flag is
>      set but is not set otherwise so the behaviour of a normal fallocate will
>      be to still zero the range.
>
>      The performance improvement of the use case of many concurrent writes from
>      different nodes of very big files grown linearly is massive.
>
>      I am including the fio job which we have run on every host concurrently but
>      on different set of files
>
>      [ten-files]
>      directory=a0:a1:a2:a3:a4:a5:a6:a7:a8:a9
>      nrfiles=1
>      size=22G
>      bs=256k
>      rw=write
>      buffered=0
>      ioengine=libaio
>      fallocate=none
>      overwrite=1
>      numjobs=10
>
>      Signed-off-by: Stefano Panella <stefano.panella at citrix.com>
>
> diff --git a/fs/gfs2/file.c b/fs/gfs2/file.c
> index 4c0ebff..9db9105 100644
> --- a/fs/gfs2/file.c
> +++ b/fs/gfs2/file.c
> @@ -26,6 +26,7 @@
>   #include <linux/dlm.h>
>   #include <linux/dlm_plock.h>
>   #include <linux/delay.h>
> +#include <linux/module.h>
>
>
>   #include "gfs2.h"
>   #include "incore.h"
> @@ -41,6 +42,17 @@
>   #include "trans.h"
>   #include "util.h"
>
> +static int gfs2_allocation_quantum __read_mostly = 0;
> +module_param_named(allocation_quantum, gfs2_allocation_quantum, int, 0644);
> +MODULE_PARM_DESC(allocation_quantum, "Allocation quantum for gfs2 writes in kBytes, "
> +                "-1 will not attempt to fallocate, "
> +                "0 will only fallocate without zeroing the part which is going to be written any way, "
> +                "bigger than 0 is same as zero but will round up the allocation size by this value interpreted as kBytes");
> +
> +#define GFS2_FALLOCATE_NO_ZERO 1
> +static long __gfs2_fallocate_internal(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset,
> +                                     loff_t len, int flags);
> +
>   /**
>    * gfs2_llseek - seek to a location in a file
>    * @file: the file
> @@ -695,13 +707,42 @@ static ssize_t gfs2_file_write_iter(struct kiocb *iocb, struct iov_iter *from)
>   {
>          struct file *file = iocb->ki_filp;
>          struct gfs2_inode *ip = GFS2_I(file_inode(file));
> +       u64 offset, size, cluster;
>          int ret;
>
>          ret = gfs2_rsqa_alloc(ip);
>          if (ret)
>                  return ret;
>
> -       gfs2_size_hint(file, iocb->ki_pos, iov_iter_count(from));
> +       offset = iocb->ki_pos;
> +       size = iov_iter_count(from);
> +
> +       gfs2_size_hint(file, offset, size);
> +
> +       if (gfs2_allocation_quantum > -1) {
> +               /* Make an attempt to fallocate the full size of the write if
> +                * not already allocated in the file, this will decrease
> +                * fragmentation and improve overall performance over allocating
> +                * a page size at the time as it would happen in gfs2_write_begin */
> +               if (gfs2_write_alloc_required(ip, offset, size)) {
> +                       if (gfs2_allocation_quantum) {
> +                               /* if gfs2_allocation_quantum > 0 we do not just
> +                                * allocate the part missing that is just to be
> +                                * written but we round it up to the allocation
> +                                * quantum in an attempt to do few growing
> +                                * operations at the expense of wasting a bit
> +                                * more space
> +                                */
> +                               cluster = gfs2_allocation_quantum * 1024;
> +                               size = (((offset + size + cluster - 1) /
> +                                        cluster) * cluster) - offset;
> +                       }
> +                       ret = __gfs2_fallocate_internal(file, 0, offset, size,
> +                                                       GFS2_FALLOCATE_NO_ZERO);
> +                       if (ret)
> +                               return ret;
> +               }
> +       }
>
>          if (iocb->ki_flags & IOCB_APPEND) {
>                  struct gfs2_holder gh;
> @@ -716,7 +757,7 @@ static ssize_t gfs2_file_write_iter(struct kiocb *iocb, struct iov_iter *from)
>   }
>
>   static int fallocate_chunk(struct inode *inode, loff_t offset, loff_t len,
> -                          int mode)
> +                          int mode, int flags)
>   {
>          struct gfs2_inode *ip = GFS2_I(inode);
>          struct buffer_head *dibh;
> @@ -739,7 +780,10 @@ static int fallocate_chunk(struct inode *inode, loff_t offset, loff_t len,
>          while (len) {
>                  struct buffer_head bh_map = { .b_state = 0, .b_blocknr = 0 };
>                  bh_map.b_size = len;
> -               set_buffer_zeronew(&bh_map);
> +               if (flags & GFS2_FALLOCATE_NO_ZERO)
> +                       clear_buffer_zeronew(&bh_map);
> +               else
> +                       set_buffer_zeronew(&bh_map);
>
>                  error = gfs2_block_map(inode, lblock, &bh_map, 1);
>                  if (unlikely(error))
> @@ -749,9 +793,11 @@ static int fallocate_chunk(struct inode *inode, loff_t offset, loff_t len,
>                  lblock += nr_blks;
>                  if (!buffer_new(&bh_map))
>                          continue;
> -               if (unlikely(!buffer_zeronew(&bh_map))) {
> -                       error = -EIO;
> -                       goto out;
> +               if (!(flags & GFS2_FALLOCATE_NO_ZERO)) {
> +                       if (unlikely(!buffer_zeronew(&bh_map))) {
> +                               error = -EIO;
> +                               goto out;
> +                       }
>                  }
>          }
>   out:
> @@ -791,7 +837,8 @@ static void calc_max_reserv(struct gfs2_inode *ip, loff_t *len,
>          }
>   }
>
> -static long __gfs2_fallocate(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset, loff_t len)
> +static long __gfs2_fallocate(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset, loff_t len,
> +                            int flags)
>   {
>          struct inode *inode = file_inode(file);
>          struct gfs2_sbd *sdp = GFS2_SB(inode);
> @@ -877,7 +924,7 @@ static long __gfs2_fallocate(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset, loff_t
>                  if (error)
>                          goto out_trans_fail;
>
> -               error = fallocate_chunk(inode, offset, max_bytes, mode);
> +               error = fallocate_chunk(inode, offset, max_bytes, mode, flags);
>                  gfs2_trans_end(sdp);
>
>                  if (error)
> @@ -904,7 +951,8 @@ out_qunlock:
>          return error;
>   }
>
> -static long gfs2_fallocate(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset, loff_t len)
> +static long __gfs2_fallocate_internal(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset,
> +                                     loff_t len, int flags)
>   {
>          struct inode *inode = file_inode(file);
>          struct gfs2_sbd *sdp = GFS2_SB(inode);
> @@ -940,7 +988,7 @@ static long gfs2_fallocate(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset, loff_t le
>          if (ret)
>                  goto out_putw;
>
> -       ret = __gfs2_fallocate(file, mode, offset, len);
> +       ret = __gfs2_fallocate(file, mode, offset, len, flags);
>          if (ret)
>                  gfs2_rs_deltree(&ip->i_res);
>
> @@ -954,6 +1002,11 @@ out_uninit:
>          return ret;
>   }
>
> +static long gfs2_fallocate(struct file *file, int mode, loff_t offset, loff_t len)
> +{
> +       return __gfs2_fallocate_internal(file, mode, offset, len, 0);
> +}
> +
>   static ssize_t gfs2_file_splice_read(struct file *in, loff_t *ppos,
>                                       struct pipe_inode_info *pipe, size_t len,
>                                       unsigned int flags)
>




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