The above commit added WRITE_SYNC and switched various places to using
that for committing writes that will be waited upon immediately after
submission. However, this causes a performance regression with AS and CFQ
for ext3 at least, since sync_dirty_buffer() will submit some writes with
WRITE_SYNC while ext3 has sumitted others dependent writes without the sync
flag set. This causes excessive anticipation/idling in the IO scheduler
because sync and async writes get interleaved, causing a big performance
regression for the below test case (which is meant to simulate sqlite
like behaviour).
---- test case ----
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int fdes, i;
FILE *fp;
struct timeval start;
struct timeval end;
struct timeval res;
gettimeofday(&start, NULL);
for (i=0; i<ROWS; i++) {
fp = fopen("test_file", "a");
fprintf(fp, "Some Text Data\n");
fdes = fileno(fp);
fsync(fdes);
fclose(fp);
}
gettimeofday(&end, NULL);
timersub(&end, &start, &res);
fprintf(stdout, "time to write %d lines is %ld(msec)\n", ROWS,
(res.tv_sec*1000000 + res.tv_usec)/1000);
return 0;
}
-------------------
Thanks to Sean.White@APCC.com for tracking down this performance
regression and providing a test case.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
78f707bfc7