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Date:   Thu, 13 Jun 2019 17:21:12 -0400
From:   Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@gmail.com>
To:     Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>
Cc:     Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>,
        "Darrick J . Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>, Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>,
        Linux List Kernel Mailing <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-xfs <linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>,
        Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: pagecache locking (was: bcachefs status update) merged)
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On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 03:13:40PM -0600, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> There are definitely workloads that require multiple threads doing non-overlapping
> writes to a single file in HPC.  This is becoming an increasingly common problem
> as the number of cores on a single client increase, since there is typically one
> thread per core trying to write to a shared file.  Using multiple files (one per
> core) is possible, but that has file management issues for users when there are a
> million cores running on the same job/file (obviously not on the same client node)
> dumping data every hour.

Mixed buffered and O_DIRECT though? That profile looks like just buffered IO to
me.

> We were just looking at this exact problem last week, and most of the threads are
> spinning in grab_cache_page_nowait->add_to_page_cache_lru() and set_page_dirty()
> when writing at 1.9GB/s when they could be writing at 5.8GB/s (when threads are
> writing O_DIRECT instead of buffered).  Flame graph is attached for 16-thread case,
> but high-end systems today easily have 2-4x that many cores.

Yeah I've been spending some time on buffered IO performance too - 4k page
overhead is a killer.

bcachefs has a buffered write path that looks up multiple pages at a time and
locks them, and then copies the data to all the pages at once (I stole the idea
from btrfs). It was a very significant performance increase.

https://evilpiepirate.org/git/bcachefs.git/tree/fs/bcachefs/fs-io.c#n1498