On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Edward Tomasz Napierała <tr...@freebsd.org>
wrote:

> On 0902T1729, Warner Losh wrote:
> > Author: imp
> > Date: Wed Sep  2 17:29:30 2015
> > New Revision: 287405
> > URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/287405
> >
> > Log:
> >   After the introduction of direct dispatch, the pacing code in g_down()
> >   broke in two ways. One, the pacing variable was accessed in multiple
> >   threads in an unsafe way. Two, since large numbers of I/O could come
> >   down from the buf layer at one time, large numbers of allocation
> >   failures could happen all at once, resulting in a huge pace value that
> >   would limit I/Os to 10 IOPS for minutes (or even hours) at a
> >   time. While a real solution to these problems requires substantial
> >   work (to go to a no-allocation after the first model, or to have some
> >   way to wait for more memory with some kind of reserve for pager and
> >   swapper requests), it is relatively easy to make this simplistic
> >   pacing less pathological.
>
> Shouldn't we emit some warning the first time this happens, to aid
> in debugging strange IO performance degradation?  Something like...


No. We shouldn't. We should fix the damn underlying problem instead
of polishing this turd of a rate limiter. It is really horrible by design
and my patches make it less horrible only by degree.

I know it is tempting, but this is no different than dropping a packet
or many of the other places where we return ENOMEM and do
retries or not based on the local policy. Well, apart from the
horrible policy we implement....


>
> > @@ -688,7 +699,7 @@ g_io_deliver(struct bio *bp, int error)
> >       bp->bio_driver2 = NULL;
> >       bp->bio_pflags = 0;
> >       g_io_request(bp, cp);
>
>         if (warned_about_pace == 0) {
>                 printf("WARNING: GEOM io allocation failed; expect reduced
> IO performance\n");
>                 warned_about_pace = 1;
>         }
>

We have no good facility to pace these messages out, and failures are
typically very transient. The old code would explode a shortage that
was < 1s into reduced I/O performance for minutes or hours (yes, hours).
The new code typically will see shortages in the millisecond to tens of
millisecond duration. Adding this would be just noise. We don't whine
when we drop packets in the network layer. We just provide a count
of dropped packets. This also causes a performance degradation.

There's adequate statistical reporting in uma to see if this is happening.

Anyway, I will spend exactly 0 more energy on polishing the POS pace
turd. I'll spend somewhat more time and energy on exploring real
fixes to this issue.

Warner

> -     pace++;
> > +     pace = 1;
> >       return;
> >  }
>
>
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