Re: [PATCH 004 of 11] md: Increase the delay before marking metadata clean, and make it configurable.

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Neil Brown wrote:

On Sunday April 30, [email protected] wrote:

NeilBrown <[email protected]> wrote:


When a md array has been idle (no writes) for 20msecs it is marked as
'clean'.  This delay turns out to be too short for some real
workloads.  So increase it to 200msec (the time to update the metadata
should be a tiny fraction of that) and make it sysfs-configurable.


...

+   safe_mode_delay
+     When an md array has seen no write requests for a certain period
+     of time, it will be marked as 'clean'.  When another write
+     request arrive, the array is marked as 'dirty' before the write
+     commenses.  This is known as 'safe_mode'.
+     The 'certain period' is controlled by this file which stores the
+     period as a number of seconds.  The default is 200msec (0.200).
+     Writing a value of 0 disables safemode.
+

Why not make the units milliseconds?  Rename this to safe_mode_delay_msecs
to remove any doubt.


Because umpteen years ago when I was adding thread-usage statistics to
/proc/net/rpc/nfsd I used milliseconds and Linus asked me to make it
seconds - a much more "obvious" unit.  See Email below.
It seems very sensible to me.


Either way, all ambiguity is removed if you put the unit in the name. And
don't use jiffies because that obviously is not portable (which sounds like
it was Linus' biggest concern).

Once you do that, I don't much care whether you use seconds or milliseconds.
Other than to note that many of our units now are ms, especially when they're measuring things at or around the ms order of magnitude. But I'm not aware of
so many proc values that don't work in integers.

--

Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com -
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Photo]     [Stuff]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Linux for the blind]     [Linux Resources]
  Powered by Linux