writeback: double the dirty thresholds

Enlarge default dirty ratios from 5/10 to 10/20.  This fixes [Bug
#12809] iozone regression with 2.6.29-rc6.

The iozone benchmarks are performed on a 1200M file, with 8GB ram.

  iozone -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 -i 3 -i 4 -r 4k -s 64k -s 512m -s 1200m -b tmp.xls
  iozone -B -r 4k -s 64k -s 512m -s 1200m -b tmp.xls

The performance regression is triggered by commit 1cf6e7d83bf3(mm: task
dirty accounting fix), which makes more correct/thorough dirty
accounting.

The default 5/10 dirty ratios were picked (a) with the old dirty logic
and (b) largely at random and (c) designed to be aggressive.  In
particular, that (a) means that having fixed some of the dirty
accounting, maybe the real bug is now that it was always too aggressive,
just hidden by an accounting issue.

The enlarged 10/20 dirty ratios are just about enough to fix the regression.

[ We will have to look at how this affects the old fsync() latency issue,
  but that probably will need independent work.  - Linus ]

Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reported-by: "Lin, Ming M" <ming.m.lin@intel.com>
Tested-by: "Lin, Ming M" <ming.m.lin@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
index 74dc57c74349ff124dd31a3e04531ee503ecedca..40ca7cdb653ec280d8115ff3d8b35cb6ee57669e 100644 (file)
--- a/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ b/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ static inline long sync_writeback_pages(void)
 /*
  * Start background writeback (via pdflush) at this percentage
  */
-int dirty_background_ratio = 5;
+int dirty_background_ratio = 10;
 
 /*
  * dirty_background_bytes starts at 0 (disabled) so that it is a function of
@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ int vm_highmem_is_dirtyable;
 /*
  * The generator of dirty data starts writeback at this percentage
  */
-int vm_dirty_ratio = 10;
+int vm_dirty_ratio = 20;
 
 /*
  * vm_dirty_bytes starts at 0 (disabled) so that it is a function of