Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 04 May 2007 11:39:22 +0400 Alex Tomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Andrew Morton wrote: > > I'm still not understanding. The terms you're using are a bit ambiguous. > > > > What does "find some dirty unallocated blocks" mean? Find a page which is > > dirty and which does not have a

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: I'm still not understanding. The terms you're using are a bit ambiguous. What does "find some dirty unallocated blocks" mean? Find a page which is dirty and which does not have a disk mapping? Normally the above operation would be implemented via

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:57:12 +0400 Alex Tomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Andrew Morton wrote: > > On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:18:12 +0400 Alex Tomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >> Andrew Morton wrote: > >>> Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the > >>>

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:18:12 +0400 Alex Tomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Andrew Morton wrote: Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the context of a commit. But no-no, this isn't required. we only need to mark pages/blocks within

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:18:12 +0400 Alex Tomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Andrew Morton wrote: > > Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the > > context of a commit. But > > no-no, this isn't required. we only need to mark pages/blocks within > transaction,

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the context of a commit. But no-no, this isn't required. we only need to mark pages/blocks within transaction, otherwise race is possible when we allocate blocks in transaction, then transacton starts

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the context of a commit. But no-no, this isn't required. we only need to mark pages/blocks within transaction, otherwise race is possible when we allocate blocks in transaction, then transacton starts

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:18:12 +0400 Alex Tomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andrew Morton wrote: Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the context of a commit. But no-no, this isn't required. we only need to mark pages/blocks within transaction, otherwise

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:18:12 +0400 Alex Tomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andrew Morton wrote: Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the context of a commit. But no-no, this isn't required. we only need to mark pages/blocks within

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:57:12 +0400 Alex Tomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andrew Morton wrote: On Fri, 04 May 2007 10:18:12 +0400 Alex Tomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andrew Morton wrote: Yes, there can be issues with needing to allocate journal space within the context of a commit. But

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: I'm still not understanding. The terms you're using are a bit ambiguous. What does find some dirty unallocated blocks mean? Find a page which is dirty and which does not have a disk mapping? Normally the above operation would be implemented via

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-04 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 04 May 2007 11:39:22 +0400 Alex Tomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andrew Morton wrote: I'm still not understanding. The terms you're using are a bit ambiguous. What does find some dirty unallocated blocks mean? Find a page which is dirty and which does not have a disk mapping?

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-03 Thread Andrew Morton
On Thu, 03 May 2007 21:38:10 +0400 Alex Tomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Andrew Morton wrote: > > We can make great improvements here, and I've (twice) previously decribed > > how: hoist the entire ordered-mode data handling out of ext3, and out of > > the buffer_head layer and move it up into

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-03 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: We can make great improvements here, and I've (twice) previously decribed how: hoist the entire ordered-mode data handling out of ext3, and out of the buffer_head layer and move it up into the VFS pagecache layer. Basically, do ordered-data with a commit-time inode walk,

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-03 Thread Alex Tomas
Andrew Morton wrote: We can make great improvements here, and I've (twice) previously decribed how: hoist the entire ordered-mode data handling out of ext3, and out of the buffer_head layer and move it up into the VFS pagecache layer. Basically, do ordered-data with a commit-time inode walk,

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-03 Thread Andrew Morton
On Thu, 03 May 2007 21:38:10 +0400 Alex Tomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andrew Morton wrote: We can make great improvements here, and I've (twice) previously decribed how: hoist the entire ordered-mode data handling out of ext3, and out of the buffer_head layer and move it up into the VFS

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-02 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 08:53 +0200, Jens Axboe wrote: > On Fri, Apr 27 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > So I do believe that we could probably do something about the IO > > scheduling _too_: > > > > - break up large write requests (yeah, it will make for worse IO > >throughput, but if make

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-02 Thread Jens Axboe
On Fri, Apr 27 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > So I do believe that we could probably do something about the IO > scheduling _too_: > > - break up large write requests (yeah, it will make for worse IO >throughput, but if make it configurable, and especially with >controllers that don't

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-02 Thread Jens Axboe
On Fri, Apr 27 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: So I do believe that we could probably do something about the IO scheduling _too_: - break up large write requests (yeah, it will make for worse IO throughput, but if make it configurable, and especially with controllers that don't have

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-05-02 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 08:53 +0200, Jens Axboe wrote: On Fri, Apr 27 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: So I do believe that we could probably do something about the IO scheduling _too_: - break up large write requests (yeah, it will make for worse IO throughput, but if make it

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-30 Thread Jens Axboe
On Sat, Apr 28 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > The main problem is that if the user extracts tar archive, tar eventually > > blocks on writeback I/O --- O.K. But if bash attempts to write one page to > > .bash_history file at the same time, it blocks too --- bad, the user is > > annoyed. > >

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-30 Thread Jens Axboe
On Sat, Apr 28 2007, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > >So perhaps if there's any privileged reads going on then we should limit > >writes to a depth of 2 at most, with some timeout mechanism that would > > SCSI has a "high priority" bit in the command block, so you can just set > it --- but I am not

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-30 Thread Jens Axboe
On Sat, Apr 28 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: The main problem is that if the user extracts tar archive, tar eventually blocks on writeback I/O --- O.K. But if bash attempts to write one page to .bash_history file at the same time, it blocks too --- bad, the user is annoyed. Right, but

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-30 Thread Jens Axboe
On Sat, Apr 28 2007, Mikulas Patocka wrote: So perhaps if there's any privileged reads going on then we should limit writes to a depth of 2 at most, with some timeout mechanism that would SCSI has a high priority bit in the command block, so you can just set it --- but I am not sure how

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-29 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Lee Revell wrote: On 4/28/07, Mikulas Patocka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I most wonder, why vim fsyncs its swapfile regularly (blocking typing during that) and doesn't fsync the resulting file on :w :-/ Never seen this. Why would fsync block typing unless vim was doing

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-29 Thread Mark Lord
Lee Revell wrote: On 4/28/07, Mikulas Patocka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I most wonder, why vim fsyncs its swapfile regularly (blocking typing during that) and doesn't fsync the resulting file on :w :-/ Never seen this. Why would fsync block typing unless vim was doing disk IO for every

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-29 Thread Mark Lord
Lee Revell wrote: On 4/28/07, Mikulas Patocka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I most wonder, why vim fsyncs its swapfile regularly (blocking typing during that) and doesn't fsync the resulting file on :w :-/ Never seen this. Why would fsync block typing unless vim was doing disk IO for every

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-29 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Lee Revell wrote: On 4/28/07, Mikulas Patocka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I most wonder, why vim fsyncs its swapfile regularly (blocking typing during that) and doesn't fsync the resulting file on :w :-/ Never seen this. Why would fsync block typing unless vim was doing

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 07:37:17AM +0200, Mikulas Patocka wrote: SpadFS doesn't write to unallocated parts like log filesystems (LFS) or phase tree filesystems (TUX2); it writes inside normal used structures, but it marks each structure with generation tags --- when it updates global table of

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread hui
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 07:37:17AM +0200, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > SpadFS doesn't write to unallocated parts like log filesystems (LFS) or > phase tree filesystems (TUX2); it writes inside normal used structures, > but it marks each structure with generation tags --- when it updates > global

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Lee Revell
On 4/28/07, Mikulas Patocka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I most wonder, why vim fsyncs its swapfile regularly (blocking typing during that) and doesn't fsync the resulting file on :w :-/ Never seen this. Why would fsync block typing unless vim was doing disk IO for every keystroke? Lee - To

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
hm, fsync. Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a kernel on my laptop which had "return 0;" at the top of fsync() and fdatasync(). Most pleasurable. But wedging for 20 minutes is probably excessive

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: The main problem is that if the user extracts tar archive, tar eventually blocks on writeback I/O --- O.K. But if bash attempts to write one page to .bash_history file at the same time, it blocks too --- bad, the user is annoyed. Right, but it's

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
So perhaps if there's any privileged reads going on then we should limit writes to a depth of 2 at most, with some timeout mechanism that would SCSI has a "high priority" bit in the command block, so you can just set it --- but I am not sure how well do disks support it. Mikulas gradually

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Paolo Ornati
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 09:30:06 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There are worse examples. Try connecting some flash disk over USB-1, and > untar to it. Ugh. > > I'd love to have some per-device dirty limit, but it's harder than it > should be. this one should help:

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Ingo Molnar
* Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Even with a good software IO scheduler, when you have disks that do > tagged queueing, if you fill up the disk queue with a few dozen > (depends on the disk what the queue limit is) huge write requests, it > doesn't really matter if the _software_

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Matthias Andree wrote: > > Another thing that is rather unpleasant (haven't yet tried fiddling with > the dirty limits) is UDF to DVD-RAM - try rsyncing /home to a DVD-RAM, > that's going to leave you with tons of dirty buffers that clear slowly > -- "watch -n 1 grep -i

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > > > > Especially with lots of memory, allowing 40% of that memory to be dirty is > > just insane (even if we limit it to "just" 40% of the normal memory zone. > > That can be gigabytes. And no amount of IO scheduling will make it > > pleasant to try

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Andrew Morton
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:51:48 +0200 Matthias Andree <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > But none of this explains a 20-minute hang, unless a *lot* of fsyncs are > > being performed, perhaps. > > Another thing that is rather unpleasant (haven't yet tried

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Matthias Andree
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Andrew Morton wrote: > But none of this explains a 20-minute hang, unless a *lot* of fsyncs are > being performed, perhaps. Another thing that is rather unpleasant (haven't yet tried fiddling with the dirty limits) is UDF to DVD-RAM - try rsyncing /home to a DVD-RAM, that's

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Matthias Andree
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. > > I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would come along and tell > everybody that this whole journal-logging is stupid, and that it's just > better to not ever re-write blocks on disk, but instead write to new

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Matthias Andree
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Marat Buharov wrote: > > > > On 4/27/07, Andrew Morton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important > > > that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 00:01 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:32:32 +0200 Mike Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 06:25 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote: > > As promised, I tested with a kernel that I know for fact that I have > > tested heavy IO on

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Andrew Morton
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:32:32 +0200 Mike Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 06:25 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote: > > On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 08:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > > Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do > > > > > > echo 5 >

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 06:25 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote: > On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 08:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do > > > > echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio > > echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio > > That seems to

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Mike Galbraith wrote: As subject states, my GUI is going away for extended periods of time when my very full and likely highly fragmented (how to find out) filesystem is under heavy write load. While write is under way, if

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Bill Huey wrote: On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 12:50:34PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would come along and tell everybody that this whole journal-logging is stupid, and that it's just better to not ever

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Bill Huey wrote: On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 12:50:34PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would come along and tell everybody that this whole journal-logging is stupid, and that it's just better to not ever

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 06:25 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote: On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 08:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do echo 5 /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio echo 10 /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio That seems to have done the

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Mike Galbraith wrote: As subject states, my GUI is going away for extended periods of time when my very full and likely highly fragmented (how to find out) filesystem is under heavy write load. While write is under way, if

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Andrew Morton
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:32:32 +0200 Mike Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 06:25 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote: On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 08:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do echo 5

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 00:01 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 08:32:32 +0200 Mike Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 06:25 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote: As promised, I tested with a kernel that I know for fact that I have tested heavy IO on previously,

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Matthias Andree
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Marat Buharov wrote: On 4/27/07, Andrew Morton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a kernel on my

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Matthias Andree
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would come along and tell everybody that this whole journal-logging is stupid, and that it's just better to not ever re-write blocks on disk, but instead write to new

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Matthias Andree
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Andrew Morton wrote: But none of this explains a 20-minute hang, unless a *lot* of fsyncs are being performed, perhaps. Another thing that is rather unpleasant (haven't yet tried fiddling with the dirty limits) is UDF to DVD-RAM - try rsyncing /home to a DVD-RAM, that's

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Andrew Morton
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:51:48 +0200 Matthias Andree [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Andrew Morton wrote: But none of this explains a 20-minute hang, unless a *lot* of fsyncs are being performed, perhaps. Another thing that is rather unpleasant (haven't yet tried fiddling

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Mikulas Patocka wrote: Especially with lots of memory, allowing 40% of that memory to be dirty is just insane (even if we limit it to just 40% of the normal memory zone. That can be gigabytes. And no amount of IO scheduling will make it pleasant to try to handle

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Matthias Andree wrote: Another thing that is rather unpleasant (haven't yet tried fiddling with the dirty limits) is UDF to DVD-RAM - try rsyncing /home to a DVD-RAM, that's going to leave you with tons of dirty buffers that clear slowly -- watch -n 1 grep -i dirty

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Ingo Molnar
* Linus Torvalds [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Even with a good software IO scheduler, when you have disks that do tagged queueing, if you fill up the disk queue with a few dozen (depends on the disk what the queue limit is) huge write requests, it doesn't really matter if the _software_

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Paolo Ornati
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 09:30:06 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There are worse examples. Try connecting some flash disk over USB-1, and untar to it. Ugh. I'd love to have some per-device dirty limit, but it's harder than it should be. this one should help: Patch: per

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
So perhaps if there's any privileged reads going on then we should limit writes to a depth of 2 at most, with some timeout mechanism that would SCSI has a high priority bit in the command block, so you can just set it --- but I am not sure how well do disks support it. Mikulas gradually

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: The main problem is that if the user extracts tar archive, tar eventually blocks on writeback I/O --- O.K. But if bash attempts to write one page to .bash_history file at the same time, it blocks too --- bad, the user is annoyed. Right, but it's

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
hm, fsync. Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a kernel on my laptop which had return 0; at the top of fsync() and fdatasync(). Most pleasurable. But wedging for 20 minutes is probably excessive

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Lee Revell
On 4/28/07, Mikulas Patocka [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I most wonder, why vim fsyncs its swapfile regularly (blocking typing during that) and doesn't fsync the resulting file on :w :-/ Never seen this. Why would fsync block typing unless vim was doing disk IO for every keystroke? Lee - To

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread hui
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 07:37:17AM +0200, Mikulas Patocka wrote: SpadFS doesn't write to unallocated parts like log filesystems (LFS) or phase tree filesystems (TUX2); it writes inside normal used structures, but it marks each structure with generation tags --- when it updates global table

Re: [ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-28 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 07:37:17AM +0200, Mikulas Patocka wrote: SpadFS doesn't write to unallocated parts like log filesystems (LFS) or phase tree filesystems (TUX2); it writes inside normal used structures, but it marks each structure with generation tags --- when it updates global table of

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mikulas Patocka
On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Mikulas Patocka wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Bill Huey wrote: Hi SpadFS doesn't write to unallocated parts like log filesystems (LFS) or phase tree filesystems (TUX2); --- BTW, I don't think that writing to unallocated parts of disk is good idea. These filesystems

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 08:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do > > echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio > echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio That seems to have done the trick. Amarok and GUI aren't exactly speed demons while

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:31:30 -0600 Andreas Dilger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Apr 27, 2007 08:30 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On a good filesystem, when you do "fsync()" on a file, nothing at all > > happens to any other files. On ext3, it seems to sync the global journal, > > which

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:09:06 -0600 Zan Lynx <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 11:31 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > [snip] > > ext3's problem here is that a single fsync() requires that ext3 sync the > > whole filesystem. Because > > > > - a journal commit can contain metadata

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > > Interesting. For my laptop, I have configured like 90 for > dirty_background_ratio and 95 for dirty_ratio. Makes for a nice > delayed write, but I do not do workloads bigger than extracing kernel > tarballs (~250 MB) and coding away on that machine

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Manoj Joseph
Linus Torvalds wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Andreas Dilger wrote: It's true that this is a "feature" of ext3 with data=ordered (the default), but I suspect the same thing is now true in reiserfs too. Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. Go back to ext2? ;) I was actually _really_ hoping that

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Stephen Clark
Linus Torvalds wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Andreas Dilger wrote: It's true that this is a "feature" of ext3 with data=ordered (the default), but I suspect the same thing is now true in reiserfs too. Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Gabriel C
Linus Torvalds wrote: There was even somebody who did something like that for a PhD thesis, I forget the details (and it apparently died when the thesis was presumably accepted ;). You mean SpadFS[1] right ? Linus Gabriel [1]

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Miquel van Smoorenburg
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you write: >I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would come along and tell >everybody that this whole journal-logging is stupid, and that it's just >better to not ever re-write blocks on disk, but instead write to new >blocks with version numbers (and not

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread hui
On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 12:50:34PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. > > I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would come along and tell > everybody that this whole journal-logging is stupid, and that it's just > better to not ever re-write blocks on disk, but

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Jan Engelhardt
On Apr 27 2007 08:18, Linus Torvalds wrote: > >Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do > > echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio > echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio > >and say if it seems to improve things. I think those are much saner >defaults especially for a

RE: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Hua Zhong
ay, April 27, 2007 12:51 PM > To: Andreas Dilger > Cc: Marat Buharov; Andrew Morton; Mike Galbraith; LKML; Jens Axboe; > [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Alex Tomas > Subject: Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose > when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Andreas Dilger wrote: > > It's true that this is a "feature" of ext3 with data=ordered (the default), > but I suspect the same thing is now true in reiserfs too. Oh, well.. Journalling sucks. I was actually _really_ hoping that somebody would come along and tell everybody

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 13:31 -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote: > I believe > Alex has a patch to have it checkpoint much smaller chunks to the fs. I wouldn't be averse to test driving such a patch (understatement). You have a pointer? -Mike - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Marko Macek
Linus Torvalds wrote: On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, John Anthony Kazos Jr. wrote: Could[/should] this stuff be changed from ratios to amounts? Or a quick boot-time test to use a ratio if the memory is small and an amount (like tax brackets, I would expect) if it's great? Yes, the "percentage" thing

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Andreas Dilger
On Apr 27, 2007 08:30 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On a good filesystem, when you do "fsync()" on a file, nothing at all > happens to any other files. On ext3, it seems to sync the global journal, > which means that just about *everything* that writes even a single byte > (well, at least

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 11:31 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > But none of this explains a 20-minute hang, unless a *lot* of fsyncs are > being performed, perhaps. Yes. I need to do a lot more testing. All I see is one, and it's game over. Bizarre. -Mike - To unsubscribe from this list:

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 08:18 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > Actually, you don't need to apply the patch - just do > > echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio > echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio > I'll try this, and do some testing with other kernels as well. -Mike -

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Zan Lynx
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 11:31 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: [snip] > ext3's problem here is that a single fsync() requires that ext3 sync the > whole filesystem. Because > > - a journal commit can contain metadata from multiple files, and if we > want to journal one file's metadata via fsync(), we

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 08:18:34 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio > echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio That'll help a lot. ext3's problem here is that a single fsync() requires that ext3 sync the whole filesystem.

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Chuck Ebbert
Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, John Anthony Kazos Jr. wrote: >> Could[/should] this stuff be changed from ratios to amounts? Or a quick >> boot-time test to use a ratio if the memory is small and an amount (like >> tax brackets, I would expect) if it's great? > > Yes, the

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, John Anthony Kazos Jr. wrote: > > Could[/should] this stuff be changed from ratios to amounts? Or a quick > boot-time test to use a ratio if the memory is small and an amount (like > tax brackets, I would expect) if it's great? Yes, the "percentage" thing was likely

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread John Anthony Kazos Jr.
> One thing to try out (and dammit, I should make it the default now in > 2.6.21) is to just make the dirty limits much lower. We've been talking > about this for ages, I think this might be the right time to do it. Could[/should] this stuff be changed from ratios to amounts? Or a quick

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Marat Buharov wrote: > > On 4/27/07, Andrew Morton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important > > that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a kernel on my > > laptop which had "return 0;" at the top

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Linus Torvalds
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Mike Galbraith wrote: > > As subject states, my GUI is going away for extended periods of time > when my very full and likely highly fragmented (how to find out) > filesystem is under heavy write load. While write is under way, if > amarok (mp3 player) is running, no song

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mark Lord
Peter Zijlstra wrote: No way is globally disabling fsync() a good thing. I guess Andrew just is a sucker for punishment :-) Mmm... perhaps another nice thing to include in laptop-mode operation? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Manoj Joseph
Marat Buharov wrote: On 4/27/07, Andrew Morton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a kernel on my laptop which had "return 0;" at the top of fsync() and fdatasync(). Most

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Peter Zijlstra
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 15:59 +0400, Marat Buharov wrote: > On 4/27/07, Andrew Morton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important > > that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a kernel on my > > laptop which had "return 0;"

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Marat Buharov
On 4/27/07, Andrew Morton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Aside: why the heck do applications think that their data is so important that they need to fsync it all the time. I used to run a kernel on my laptop which had "return 0;" at the top of fsync() and fdatasync(). Most pleasurable. So, if

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 01:33 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > Another livelock possibility is that bonnie is redirtying pages faster than > commit can write them out, so commit got livelocked: > > When I was doing the original port-from-2.2 I found that an application > which does > > for ( ;

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 01:33 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:59:27 +0200 Mike Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Greetings, > > > > As subject states, my GUI is going away for extended periods of time > > when my very full and likely highly fragmented (how to find

Re: [ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Andrew Morton
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:59:27 +0200 Mike Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Greetings, > > As subject states, my GUI is going away for extended periods of time > when my very full and likely highly fragmented (how to find out) > filesystem is under heavy write load. While write is under way,

[ext3][kernels >= 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
Greetings, As subject states, my GUI is going away for extended periods of time when my very full and likely highly fragmented (how to find out) filesystem is under heavy write load. While write is under way, if amarok (mp3 player) is running, no song change will occur until write is finished,

[ext3][kernels = 2.6.20.7 at least] KDE going comatose when FS is under heavy write load (massive starvation)

2007-04-27 Thread Mike Galbraith
Greetings, As subject states, my GUI is going away for extended periods of time when my very full and likely highly fragmented (how to find out) filesystem is under heavy write load. While write is under way, if amarok (mp3 player) is running, no song change will occur until write is finished,

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