xfs: skip flushing log items during push

The AIL pushing code spends a huge amount of time skipping over
items that are already marked as flushing. It is not uncommon to
see hundreds of thousands of items skipped every second due to inode
clustering marking all the inodes in a cluster as flushing when the
first one is flushed.

However, to discover an item is already flushing and should be
skipped we have to call the iop_push() method for it to try to flush
the item. For inodes (where this matters most), we have to first
check that inode is flushable first.

We can optimise this overhead away by tracking whether the log item
is flushing internally. This allows xfsaild_push() to check the log
item directly for flushing state and immediately skip the log item.
Whilst this doesn't remove the CPU cache misses for loading the log
item, it does avoid the overhead of an indirect function call
and the cache misses involved in accessing inode and
backing cluster buffer structures to determine flushing state. When
trying to flush hundreds of thousands of inodes each second, this
CPU overhead saving adds up quickly.

It's so noticeable that the biggest issue with pushing on the AIL on
fast storage becomes the 10ms back-off wait when we hit enough
pinned buffers to break out of the push loop but not enough for the
AIL pushing to be considered stuck. This limits the xfsaild to about
70% total CPU usage, and on fast storage this isn't enough to keep
the storage 100% busy.

The xfsaild will block on IO submission on slow storage and so is
self throttling - it does not need a backoff in the case where we
are really just breaking out of the walk to submit the IO we have
gathered.

Further with no backoff we don't need to gather huge delwri lists to
mitigate the impact of backoffs, so we can submit IO more frequently
and reduce the time log items spend in flushing state by breaking
out of the item push loop once we've gathered enough IO to batch
submission effectively.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Chandan Babu R <chandanbabu@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
index ef05cbbe116c..b509cbd191f4 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
@@ -965,6 +965,7 @@ xfs_iflush_finish(
 		}
 		iip->ili_last_fields = 0;
 		iip->ili_flush_lsn = 0;
+		clear_bit(XFS_LI_FLUSHING, &lip->li_flags);
 		spin_unlock(&iip->ili_lock);
 		xfs_iflags_clear(iip->ili_inode, XFS_IFLUSHING);
 		if (drop_buffer)
@@ -1023,8 +1024,10 @@ xfs_buf_inode_io_fail(
 {
 	struct xfs_log_item	*lip;
 
-	list_for_each_entry(lip, &bp->b_li_list, li_bio_list)
+	list_for_each_entry(lip, &bp->b_li_list, li_bio_list) {
 		set_bit(XFS_LI_FAILED, &lip->li_flags);
+		clear_bit(XFS_LI_FLUSHING, &lip->li_flags);
+	}
 }
 
 /*
@@ -1043,6 +1046,7 @@ xfs_iflush_abort_clean(
 	iip->ili_flush_lsn = 0;
 	iip->ili_item.li_buf = NULL;
 	list_del_init(&iip->ili_item.li_bio_list);
+	clear_bit(XFS_LI_FLUSHING, &iip->ili_item.li_flags);
 }
 
 /*