Re: [NFS] NFS on loopback locks up entire system(2.6.23-rc6)?

["Chakri n" <chakriin5@gmail.com>]

On 9/21/07, Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com> wrote:
> No. The requirement for 'hard' mounts is not that the server be up all
> the time. The server can go up and down as it pleases: the client can
> happily recover from that.
>
> The requirement is rather that nobody remove it permanently before the
> application is done with it, and the partition is unmounted. That is
> hardly unreasonable (it is the only way I know of to ensure data
> integrity), and it is much less strict than the requirements for local
> disks.

Yes. I completely agree. This is required for data consistency.

But in my testing, if one of the NFS server/mount goes offline for
some point of time, the entire system slows down, especially IO.

In my test program, I forked off 50 threads to do 4K writes on 50
different files in a NFS mounted directory.

Now, I have turned off the NFS server and started another dd process
on local disk ("dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000") and this dd
process progresses.

I see I/O wait of 100% in vmstat.
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
-----cpu------
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   28  344  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  340  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   26  343  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  341  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   26  357  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  325  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   26  343  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  325  0
0  0 100  0

I have about 4Gig of RAM in the system and most of the memory is free.
I see only about 550MB in buffers, rest all is pretty much available.

[root@h46 ~]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3238004     609340    2628664          0      15136     551024
-/+ buffers/cache:      43180    3194824
Swap:      4096532          0    4096532

Here is the stack trace for one of my test program threads and dd
process, both of them are stuck in congestion_wait.
--------------------------------------
PID: 3552   TASK: cb1fc610  CPU: 0   COMMAND: "dd"
 #0 [f5c04c38] schedule at c0624a34
 #1 [f5c04cac] schedule_timeout at c06250ee
 #2 [f5c04cf0] io_schedule_timeout at c0624c15
 #3 [f5c04d04] congestion_wait at c045eb7d
 #4 [f5c04d28] balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr at c045ab91
 #5 [f5c04d7c] generic_file_buffered_write at c0457148
 #6 [f5c04e10] __generic_file_aio_write_nolock at c04576e5
 #7 [f5c04e84] generic_file_aio_write at c0457799
 #8 [f5c04eb4] ext3_file_write at f8888fd7
 #9 [f5c04ed0] do_sync_write at c0472e27
#10 [f5c04f7c] vfs_write at c0473689
#11 [f5c04f98] sys_write at c0473c95
#12 [f5c04fb4] sysenter_entry at c0404ddf
------------------------------------------
 #0 [f6050c10] schedule at c0624a34
 #1 [f6050c84] schedule_timeout at c06250ee
 #2 [f6050cc8] io_schedule_timeout at c0624c15
 #3 [f6050cdc] congestion_wait at c045eb7d
 #4 [f6050d00] balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr at c045ab91
 #5 [f6050d54] generic_file_buffered_write at c0457148
 #6 [f6050de8] __generic_file_aio_write_nolock at c04576e5
 #7 [f6050e40] enqueue_entity at c042131f
 #8 [f6050e5c] generic_file_aio_write at c0457799
 #9 [f6050e8c] nfs_file_write at f8f90cee
#10 [f6050e9c] getnstimeofday at c043d3f7
#11 [f6050ed0] do_sync_write at c0472e27
#12 [f6050f7c] vfs_write at c0473689
#13 [f6050f98] sys_write at c0473c95
#14 [f6050fb4] sysenter_entry at c0404ddf
-----------------------------------

Can this be worked around, since most of the RAM is available, dd
process could infact find more memory for it's buffers rather than
waiting due to NFS requests. I believe this could be one reason why
file systems like VxFS use their own buffer cache different from
system-wide buffer cache.

Thanks
--Chakri
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