tree 5b8cd5735dfbc5eb834f96d25a8eb587186715be
parent 955833cf2ad0aa39b336e853cad212d867199984
author Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> 1274407628 +1000
committer Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com> 1274715240 -0500

xfs: Improve scalability of busy extent tracking

When we free a metadata extent, we record it in the per-AG busy
extent array so that it is not re-used before the freeing
transaction hits the disk. This array is fixed size, so when it
overflows we make further allocation transactions synchronous
because we cannot track more freed extents until those transactions
hit the disk and are completed. Under heavy mixed allocation and
freeing workloads with large log buffers, we can overflow this array
quite easily.

Further, the array is sparsely populated, which means that inserts
need to search for a free slot, and array searches often have to
search many more slots that are actually used to check all the
busy extents. Quite inefficient, really.

To enable this aspect of extent freeing to scale better, we need
a structure that can grow dynamically. While in other areas of
XFS we have used radix trees, the extents being freed are at random
locations on disk so are better suited to being indexed by an rbtree.

So, use a per-AG rbtree indexed by block number to track busy
extents.  This incures a memory allocation when marking an extent
busy, but should not occur too often in low memory situations. This
should scale to an arbitrary number of extents so should not be a
limitation for features such as in-memory aggregation of
transactions.

However, there are still situations where we can't avoid allocating
busy extents (such as allocation from the AGFL). To minimise the
overhead of such occurences, we need to avoid doing a synchronous
log force while holding the AGF locked to ensure that the previous
transactions are safely on disk before we use the extent. We can do
this by marking the transaction doing the allocation as synchronous
rather issuing a log force.

Because of the locking involved and the ordering of transactions,
the synchronous transaction provides the same guarantees as a
synchronous log force because it ensures that all the prior
transactions are already on disk when the synchronous transaction
hits the disk. i.e. it preserves the free->allocate order of the
extent correctly in recovery.

By doing this, we avoid holding the AGF locked while log writes are
in progress, hence reducing the length of time the lock is held and
therefore we increase the rate at which we can allocate and free
from the allocation group, thereby increasing overall throughput.

The only problem with this approach is that when a metadata buffer is
marked stale (e.g. a directory block is removed), then buffer remains
pinned and locked until the log goes to disk. The issue here is that
if that stale buffer is reallocated in a subsequent transaction, the
attempt to lock that buffer in the transaction will hang waiting
the log to go to disk to unlock and unpin the buffer. Hence if
someone tries to lock a pinned, stale, locked buffer we need to
push on the log to get it unlocked ASAP. Effectively we are trading
off a guaranteed log force for a much less common trigger for log
force to occur.

Ideally we should not reallocate busy extents. That is a much more
complex fix to the problem as it involves direct intervention in the
allocation btree searches in many places. This is left to a future
set of modifications.

Finally, now that we track busy extents in allocated memory, we
don't need the descriptors in the transaction structure to point to
them. We can replace the complex busy chunk infrastructure with a
simple linked list of busy extents. This allows us to remove a large
chunk of code, making the overall change a net reduction in code
size.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>