writeback: fix occasional slow sync(1)

In case when system contains no dirty pages, wakeup_flusher_threads() will
submit WB_SYNC_NONE writeback for 0 pages so wb_writeback() exits
immediately without doing anything, even though there are dirty inodes in
the system.  Thus sync(1) will write all the dirty inodes from a
WB_SYNC_ALL writeback pass which is slow.

Fix the problem by using get_nr_dirty_pages() in wakeup_flusher_threads()
instead of calculating number of dirty pages manually.  That function also
takes number of dirty inodes into account.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reported-by: Paul Taysom <taysom@chromium.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c
index 68851ff2fd41c04385c5d237d8ef4a109680bc0b..87d778118027c67fdc3108301d4a99b46cdd7618 100644 (file)
--- a/fs/fs-writeback.c
+++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c
@@ -1049,10 +1049,8 @@ void wakeup_flusher_threads(long nr_pages, enum wb_reason reason)
 {
        struct backing_dev_info *bdi;
 
-       if (!nr_pages) {
-               nr_pages = global_page_state(NR_FILE_DIRTY) +
-                               global_page_state(NR_UNSTABLE_NFS);
-       }
+       if (!nr_pages)
+               nr_pages = get_nr_dirty_pages();
 
        rcu_read_lock();
        list_for_each_entry_rcu(bdi, &bdi_list, bdi_list) {