On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 02:32:17AM -0500, Tong Li wrote:
> I'm running kernbench (make -j 128 on a kernel source) back to back
> multiple times on an SMP. Among every 10 runs, there's always at least one
> run that has a run time around 40% longer than the other runs. (Before
> kernbench starts timing, it does a sync.) 'vmstat 1' indicates that the
> longer runs always have a couple of 1-sec intervals during which there are
> 10 times more block-outs (bo field) than the average traffic in the rest
> of the run, and during these intervals, many cc1 processes are in the D
> state. My file system is ext3 and all the things like journal commit
> interval, pdflush interval, etc. have the default values.
>
> I'm trying to understand why such variability occurs. I tested the same
> thing with ext2 and did not see any variability. So I'm thinking about two
> things: (1) for some reason, ext3/jbd occasionally issues a large volume
> of bursty writes to the disk (but why does it occur just sometimes, not
> always?), and (2) when there are bursty writes, the block device driver is
> not able to handle them, causing I/O waits. But I don't really have a
> clear understanding of the problem here...
If you are using an e2fsprogs older than version 1.38, you should try
expanding the journal size from the default of 32M to 128M; with the
filesystem unmounted do:
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/hdXX
tune2fs -O has_journal -J journal_size=128 /dev/hdXX
If the journal gets full and the filesystem has to do a forced journal
truncate, that can cause I/O's to stall and writes can thus get bursty
with performance becoming nasty as a result. Increasing the journal
size can avoid this, at the cost of potentially having more disk
buffers be pinned in memory, thus increasing the overhead of
unswappable kernel memory.
Regards,
- Ted
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