Re: Strange performance change 59 -> 61/62

[Andrew Morton <akpm@digeo.com>]

"Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com> wrote:
>
> >> Some more stats ... which look rather suspicious. 600% increase for
> >> dentry_open and __mark_inode_dirty? Hmmmmm.
> > 
> > __mark_inode_dirty() just got itself an smp_mb().  Would be instructive to
> > disable that.
> > 
> > dentry_open(): don't know - fs/open.c hasn't changed at all.  Perhaps
> > dcache_rcu has caused additional pingpong?
> 
> 2.5.59-mjb6             84 __mark_inode_dirty
> 2.5.61-mjb1            594 __mark_inode_dirty
> 2.5.61-mjb1-no_mb       74 __mark_inode_dirty
> 
> Yup, that fixed that one ... but presumably it was put there for a reason,
> so I can't just rip it out ;-) Thanks, I'll go take a closer look at the
> others.

mark_inode_dirty() tends to be called _very_ frequently.  Too frequently.

Could you try remounting all filesystems noatime with

	mount /mnt/point -o remount,noatime

and the below patch will prevent us calling the barrier-happy
current_kernel_time() for noatime mounts.


diff -puN fs/inode.c~update_atime-speedup fs/inode.c
--- 25/fs/inode.c~update_atime-speedup	Fri Feb 21 12:17:00 2003
+++ 25-akpm/fs/inode.c	Fri Feb 21 12:17:33 2003
@@ -1091,17 +1091,20 @@ sector_t bmap(struct inode * inode, sect
  
 void update_atime(struct inode *inode)
 {
-	struct timespec now = CURRENT_TIME; 
+	struct timespec now;
 
-	/* Can later do this more lazily with a per superblock interval */
-	if (timespec_equal(&inode->i_atime, &now))
-		return;
 	if (IS_NOATIME(inode))
 		return;
 	if (IS_NODIRATIME(inode) && S_ISDIR(inode->i_mode))
 		return;
 	if (IS_RDONLY(inode))
 		return;
+
+	now = CURRENT_TIME;
+
+	/* Can later do this more lazily with a per superblock interval */
+	if (timespec_equal(&inode->i_atime, &now))
+		return;
 	inode->i_atime = now;
 	mark_inode_dirty_sync(inode);
 }

_