| From: |
| Boris Burkov <boris-AT-bur.io> |
| To: |
| linux-btrfs-AT-vger.kernel.org, kernel-team-AT-fb.com |
| Subject: |
| [PATCH 0/5] btrfs: improve stalls under sudden writeback |
| Date: |
| Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:41:48 -0700 |
| Message-ID: |
| <cover.1774398665.git.boris@bur.io> |
| Archive-link: |
| Article |
If you have a system with very large memory (TiBs) and a normal
percentage based dirty_ratio/dirty_background_ratio like the defaults of
20%/10%, then we can theoretically rack up 100s of GiB of dirty pages
before doing any writeback. This is further exacerbated if we also see a
sudden drop in the free memory due to a large allocation. If we
(relatively likely for a large ram system) also have a large disk, we are
unlikely to do trigger much preemptive metadata reclaim either.
Once we do start doing writeback with such a large supply, the results
are somewhat ugly. The delalloc work generates a huge amount of delayed
refs without proper reservations which sends the metadata space system
into a tailspin trying to run yet more delalloc to free space.
Ultimately, the system stalls waiting for huge amounts of ordered
extents and delayed refs blocking all users in start_transaction() on
tickets in reserve_space().
This patch series aims to address these issues in a relatively targeted
way by improving our reservations for delalloc delayed refs and by doing
some very basic smoothing of the work in flush_space(). Further work
could be done to improve flush_space() heuristics and latency but this
is already a big help on my observed workloads.
I was able to reproduce stalls on a more "modest" system with 264GiB of
ram by using a somewhat silly 80% dirty_ratio.
I was unfortunately unable to reproduce any stalls on a yet smaller
system with only 32GiB of ram.
The first 3 patches do the delayed_ref rsv accounting on btrfs_inode,
mirroring inode->block_rsv.
The 4th patch is a cleanup to the types counting max extents
The 5th patch reduces the size of the unit of work in shrink_delalloc()
to further reduce stalls.
Boris Burkov (5):
btrfs: reserve space for delayed_refs in delalloc
btrfs: account for csum delayed_refs in delalloc
btrfs: account for compression in delalloc extent reservation
btrfs: make inode->outstanding_extents a u64
btrfs: cap shrink_delalloc iterations to 128M
fs/btrfs/btrfs_inode.h | 20 ++++++--
fs/btrfs/delalloc-space.c | 75 +++++++++++++++++++++-------
fs/btrfs/delayed-ref.c | 2 +-
fs/btrfs/fs.h | 13 -----
fs/btrfs/inode.c | 97 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
fs/btrfs/ordered-data.c | 4 +-
fs/btrfs/space-info.c | 31 ++++++++----
fs/btrfs/tests/inode-tests.c | 18 +++----
fs/btrfs/transaction.c | 7 +--
fs/btrfs/transaction.h | 3 +-
include/trace/events/btrfs.h | 8 +--
11 files changed, 193 insertions(+), 85 deletions(-)
--
2.53.0