We should balance dirty metadata pages at the end of btrfs_finish_ordered_io, since a small, unmergeable random write can potentially produce dirty metadata which is multiple times larger than the data itself. For example, a small, unmergeable 4KiB write may produce:
16KiB dirty leaf (and possibly 16KiB dirty node) in subvolume tree 16KiB dirty leaf (and possibly 16KiB dirty node) in checksum tree 16KiB dirty leaf (and possibly 16KiB dirty node) in extent tree Although we do call balance dirty pages in write side, but in the buffered write path, most metadata are dirtied only after we reach the dirty background limit (which by far onlys counts dirty data pages) and wakeup the flusher thread. If there are many small, unmergeable random writes spread in a large btree, we'll find a burst of dirty pages exceeds the dirty_bytes limit after we wakeup the flusher thread - which is not what we expect. In our machine, it caused out-of-memory problem since a page cannot be dropped if it is marked dirty. Someone may worry about we may sleep in btrfs_btree_balance_dirty(), but since we do btrfs_finish_ordered_io in a separate worker, it will not stop the flusher consuming dirty pages. Also, we use different worker for metadata writeback endio, sleep in btrfs_finish_ordered_io help us throttle the size of dirty metadata pages. Signed-off-by: Ethan Lien <ethanl...@synology.com> --- fs/btrfs/inode.c | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) diff --git a/fs/btrfs/inode.c b/fs/btrfs/inode.c index d241285a0d2a..d09433ab126e 100644 --- a/fs/btrfs/inode.c +++ b/fs/btrfs/inode.c @@ -3151,6 +3151,8 @@ static int btrfs_finish_ordered_io(struct btrfs_ordered_extent *ordered_extent) /* once for the tree */ btrfs_put_ordered_extent(ordered_extent); + btrfs_btree_balance_dirty(fs_info); + return ret; } -- 2.17.0 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html