Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754323Ab0KEMsZ (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Nov 2010 08:48:25 -0400 Received: from excas01.olin.edu ([209.94.128.49]:5322 "EHLO EXCAS01.olin.edu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751411Ab0KEMsX (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Nov 2010 08:48:23 -0400 Message-ID: To: Dave Chinner CC: Jesper Juhl , Chris Mason , Ingo Molnar , Pekka Enberg , Aidar Kultayev , , , Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton , Jens Axboe , Peter Zijlstra , Nick Piggin , Arjan van de Ven , Thomas Gleixner , "Ted Ts'o" , Corrado Zoccolo , Shaohua Li , Steven Barrett Subject: Re: 2.6.36 io bring the system to its knees In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:43:34 +1100." <20101105014334.GF13830@dastard> X-Mailer: MH-E 8.2; nmh 1.3; GNU Emacs 23.2.1 Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 08:48:13 -0400 From: Sanjoy Mahajan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1934 Lines: 57 Dave Chinner wrote: > I think anyone reporting a interactivity problem also needs to > indicate what their filesystem is, what mount paramters they are > using, what their storage config is, whether barriers are active or > not, what elevator they are using, whether one or more of the > applications are issuing fsync() or sync() calls, and so on. Good idea. The filesystems are all ext3 with default mount parameters. The dmesgs say that the filesystems are mounted in ordered data mode and that barriers are not enabled. mount says: /dev/sda2 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) /dev/sda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw,commit=0) /dev/sda3 on /home type ext3 (rw,commit=0) > storage config Do you mean the partition sizes? Here's that: $ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 72G 52G 17G 77% / tmpfs 755M 4.0K 755M 1% /lib/init/rw udev 750M 212K 750M 1% /dev tmpfs 755M 0 755M 0% /dev/shm /dev/sda1 274M 117M 143M 45% /boot /dev/sda3 74G 37G 33G 53% /home > elevator CFQ > sync-related calls I don't have a test from the time I ran rsync (but I'll check that tonight), but I traced the currently running emacs and iceweasel (a.k.a. firefox) with "strace -p PID 2>&1 | grep sync". That didn't turn up any sync-related calls. (I checked the firefox because I seem to remember that it used to do fsync absurdly often, but I also seem to remember that the outcry made them stop.) -Sanjoy `Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.' --African Proverb -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/