Re: kernel 2.6.13 buffer strangeness

[David Lang <david.lang@digitalinsight.com>]

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Anthony Wesley wrote:

> Hi everyone. I'm seeing something very Odd with 2.6.11 / 2.6.12 and 2.6.13, 
> it has me stumped so I want to describe my problem here and hopefully some 
> kind soul can verify that what I am seeing is a Feature and NotABug :-)
>
> It it's a Feature, then I'll find some way to work around it, but it seems to 
> me that it's a Bug :-)
>
> I have a digital video stream coming in at 25Mb/s over a firewire connector, 
> and this data is being written out to a usb2 hard drive as it's captured. The 
> hard drive can only sustain about 17Mb/s write speed, so I am in deficit by 
> 7Mb per second.
>
> I'm using a Dell Inspiron laptop with a 2GHz p4 and 1.5Gb of physical RAM, 
> running a FC3 based distro but with a number of custom kernels, including 
> 2.6.11, 2.6.12 and 2.6.13. I see the same issue on all of them.
>
> Apart from X and my capture application (Coriander) there is nothing else 
> happening on the machine, and so I see about 1.3Gb of physical ram is 
> available for buffering this data.
>
> Okay, so what I *expect* to see is this: The video will stream in and out of 
> Coriander at 25Mb/s until all the free RAM is full of dirty data waiting to 
> be written to disk. At a deficit of 7Mb/s this should take about 3 minutes to 
> fill 1.3Gb. When this point is reached I would see my write speed suddenly 
> drop from 25Mb/s to 17Mb/s because there is effectively no more RAM to 
> allocate for buffers.
>
> *But* what I actually see is that I hit this point after only 50 seconds. 
> This is very puzzling. After 50 seconds of operation I see my video write 
> speed suddenly drop to 17Mb/s.
>
> Coincidentally (or not...) this is about how long it takes the kernel to 
> allocate all of the 1.3Gb of RAM to disk buffers. If I watch "free" while I 
> am running I can see the amount of allocated buffers growing by 25Mb/s until 
> it is all used, and then my write speed immediately drops.
>
> It's as if the kernel isn't bothering to write out any of my data until it 
> runs out of RAM.
>
> Now, I'm pretty sure that the data is streaming out to the disk, cause I can 
> see the disk activity light solidly lit on the usb2 drive (very scientific). 
> There is a short delay after I start streaming before it comes on, maybe 4 or 
> 5 seconds. I've tinkered with the VM settings in /proc/sys/vm and I can make 
> the kernel start writing data faster by lowering dirty_ratio, but this does 
> not change the symptoms that I am seeing.
>
> When all 1.3Gb has been allocated to buffers after 50 seconds, 900M of that 
> should have become free to be recycled as it has been written out to the usb2 
> drive at 17Mb/s - Somehow this doesn't seem to be happening.
>
> The result that I am seeing could be explained if the kernel was not 
> releasing dirty pages after they have been written to disk, but I know this 
> doesn't make sense.
>
> Can anyone make sense of this and let me know whether this is expected 
> behaviour or not?

the kernel does wait before writing things out look at the values in 
/proc/sys/vm/dirty* to tune this and have it start writing sooner.

David Lang

--
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
 -- C.A.R. Hoare
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/