ipv4: Allow amount of dirty memory from fib resizing to be controllable

fib_trie implementation calls synchronize_rcu when a certain amount of
pages are dirty from freed entries. The number of pages was determined
experimentally in 2009 (commit c3059477fce2d).

At the current setting, synchronize_rcu is called often -- 51 times in a
second in one test with an average of an 8 msec delay adding a fib entry.
The total impact is a lot of slow down modifying the fib. This is seen
in the output of 'time' - the difference between real time and sys+user.
For example, using 720,022 single path routes and 'ip -batch'[1]:

    $ time ./ip -batch ipv4/routes-1-hops
    real    0m14.214s
    user    0m2.513s
    sys     0m6.783s

So roughly 35% of the actual time to install the routes is from the ip
command getting scheduled out, most notably due to synchronize_rcu (this
is observed using 'perf sched timehist').

This patch makes the amount of dirty memory configurable between 64k where
the synchronize_rcu is called often (small, low end systems that are memory
sensitive) to 64M where synchronize_rcu is called rarely during a large
FIB change (for high end systems with lots of memory). The default is 512kB
which corresponds to the current setting of 128 pages with a 4kB page size.

As an example, at 16MB the worst interval shows 4 calls to synchronize_rcu
in a second blocking for up to 30 msec in a single instance, and a total
of almost 100 msec across the 4 calls in the second. The trade off is
allowing FIB entries to consume more memory in a given time window but
but with much better fib insertion rates (~30% increase in prefixes/sec).
With this patch and net.ipv4.fib_sync_mem set to 16MB, the same batch
file runs in:

    $ time ./ip -batch ipv4/routes-1-hops
    real    0m9.692s
    user    0m2.491s
    sys     0m6.769s

So the dead time is reduced to about 1/2 second or <5% of the real time.

[1] 'ip' modified to not request ACK messages which improves route
    insertion times by about 20%

Signed-off-by: David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
index bd029fc55ccb..5eedc6941ce5 100644
--- a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
+++ b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
@@ -81,6 +81,11 @@ fib_multipath_hash_policy - INTEGER
 	0 - Layer 3
 	1 - Layer 4
 
+fib_sync_mem - UNSIGNED INTEGER
+	Amount of dirty memory from fib entries that can be backlogged before
+	synchronize_rcu is forced.
+	  Default: 512kB   Minimum: 64kB   Maximum: 64MB
+
 ip_forward_update_priority - INTEGER
 	Whether to update SKB priority from "TOS" field in IPv4 header after it
 	is forwarded. The new SKB priority is mapped from TOS field value