tree 53894333454bca278f20f9c5841dd1b45c384721
parent 83712358ba0a1497ce59a4f84ce4dd0f803fe6fc
author Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> 1322672935 -0600
committer Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> 1324189228 +0800

writeback: max, min and target dirty pause time

Control the pause time and the call intervals to balance_dirty_pages()
with three parameters:

1) max_pause, limited by bdi_dirty and MAX_PAUSE

2) the target pause time, grows with the number of dd tasks
   and is normally limited by max_pause/2

3) the minimal pause, set to half the target pause
   and is used to skip short sleeps and accumulate them into bigger ones

The typical behaviors after patch:

- if ever task_ratelimit is far below dirty_ratelimit, the pause time
  will remain constant at max_pause and nr_dirtied_pause will be
  fluctuating with task_ratelimit

- in the normal cases, nr_dirtied_pause will remain stable (keep in the
  same pace with dirty_ratelimit) and the pause time will be fluctuating
  with task_ratelimit

In summary, someone has to fluctuate with task_ratelimit, because

	task_ratelimit = nr_dirtied_pause / pause

We normally prefer a stable nr_dirtied_pause, until reaching max_pause.

The notable behavior changes are:

- in stable workloads, there will no longer be sudden big trajectory
  switching of nr_dirtied_pause as concerned by Peter. It will be as
  smooth as dirty_ratelimit and changing proportionally with it (as
  always, assuming bdi bandwidth does not fluctuate across 2^N lines,
  otherwise nr_dirtied_pause will show up in 2+ parallel trajectories)

- in the rare cases when something keeps task_ratelimit far below
  dirty_ratelimit, the smoothness can no longer be retained and
  nr_dirtied_pause will be "dancing" with task_ratelimit. This fixes a
  (not that destructive but still not good) bug that
	  dirty_ratelimit gets brought down undesirably
	  <= balanced_dirty_ratelimit is under estimated
	  <= weakly executed task_ratelimit
	  <= pause goes too large and gets trimmed down to max_pause
	  <= nr_dirtied_pause (based on dirty_ratelimit) is set too large
	  <= dirty_ratelimit being much larger than task_ratelimit

- introduce min_pause to avoid small pause sleeps

- when pause is trimmed down to max_pause, try to compensate it at the
  next pause time

The "refactor" type of changes are:

The max_pause equation is slightly transformed to make it slightly more
efficient.

We now scale target_pause by (N * 10ms) on 2^N concurrent tasks, which
is effectively equal to the original scaling max_pause by (N * 20ms)
because the original code does implicit target_pause ~= max_pause / 2.
Based on the same implicit ratio, target_pause starts with 10ms on 1 dd.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>