Re: Thread model (was: Ext2 superblock fault)

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 10:41:01AM +0000, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net, le Sun 16 Mar 2008 08:52:56 +0100, a écrit :

> > What makes me wonder is, how can it happen in the first place that
> > so many requests are generated before the superblock is requested
> > during handling of the first one?
> 
> ld-ing xulrunner, which needs a lot of memory (thus paging out
> superblock), and then suddenly needs to write a lot of data, which
> seemingly is not processed immediately, but on the periodical
> sync_all.

Well yes, I do understand why many requests are created in short
succession. But that is not the question.

If there are no other blocking points before the superblock read, the
first request should be able to kick off the superblock read before the
thread originally creating the requests is scheduled again -- before it
can create further requests. Why is that not the case?

This is really the main problem here. Even if we change the thread model
such that the request storm doesn't result in a deadlock (with thread
limiting) or resource exhaustion (without limiting), it will still
result in terrible performance. We need to avoid it.

I don't know how the syncing works, so I can't really tell what the
problem is. If there are blocking points before the superblock read, we
need to change that somehow. If the superblock read is the first
blocking point already, we need to change the scheduling, to make sure
that the request is handled -- up to the first blocking point -- before
returning to the requester.

-antrik-