From: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
To: bert hubert <bert.hubert@netherlabs.nl>
Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 11:40:26 +1000
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Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, linux-raid@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 004 of 11] md: Increase the delay before marking metadata clean, and make it configurable.
In-Reply-To: message from bert hubert on Tuesday May 2
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On Tuesday May 2, bert.hubert@netherlabs.nl wrote:
> On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 03:30:19PM +1000, NeilBrown wrote:
> > When a md array has been idle (no writes) for 20msecs it is marked as
> > 'clean'.  This delay turns out to be too short for some real
> > workloads.  So increase it to 200msec (the time to update the metadata
> > should be a tiny fraction of that) and make it sysfs-configurable.
> 
> What does this mean, 'too short'? What happens in that case, backing block
> devices are still busy writing? When making this configurable, the help text
> better explain what the trade offs are.

"too short" means that the update happens often enough to cause a
noticeable performance degradation.

In an application writes steadily very 21msecs (or maybe 30msecs) then
there will be 2 superblock writes and 1 application write every
21msecs, and this causes enough disk io to close the app down. - I
guess all the updates fill up the 21msec space.

With a larger delay - 200msec - you could still get bad situations
e.g. with the app writing every 210msecs.  However 2 superblock
updates plus one app write is a much smaller fraction of 200msecs, so
there shouldn't be as many problems.

Yes, a more detailed explanation should go in Documentation/md.txt

NeilBrown
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