Re: Writeout in recent kernels/VMs poor compared to last -ac

["Adam Kropelin" <akropel1@rochester.rr.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrea Arcangeli" <andrea@suse.de>
To: "Adam Kropelin" <akropel1@rochester.rr.com>
Cc: <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002 11:30 AM
Subject: Re: Writeout in recent kernels/VMs poor compared to last -ac


> On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 10:17:39AM -0500, Adam Kropelin wrote:
> > I recently began regularly transferring large (600 MB+) files to my
> > Linux-based fileserver and have noticed what I would characterize as poor
> > writeout behavior under this load. I've done a bit of comparison testing
> > which may help reveal the problem better.

<snip>

> I think you simply want to trigger the soft-bdflush event earlier, with
> -aa something like this may do the trick:
>
> echo 5 500 64 256 500 3000 60 2 0 > /proc/sys/vm/bdflush
>
> this way you'll wakeup as soon as 5% of the 118mbytes (+ free memory,
> none in this case) are dirty, and bdflush will stop as soon as the level
> is back to 2% (then kupdate will take care of the 2%). Those suggested
> values may be too strict but this way you should get the idea if it
> helps somehow or not :)

Thanks for the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't help. :(

Blocks definitely do begin hitting the disk much sooner after I begin the
transfer, but the overall time is basically unchanged: 7:08. vmstat still shows
the widely oscillating bo value.

--Adam