xfstests: 014 takes forever with large preallocation sizes

Christoph reported that test 014 went from 7s to 870s runtime with
the dynamic speculative delayed allocation changes. Analysis of test
014 shows that it does this loop 10,000 times:

	pwrite(random offset, 512 bytes);
	truncate(random offset);

Where the random offset is anywhere in a 256MB file. Hence on
average every second write or truncate extends the file.

If large preallocatione beyond EOF sizes are used each extending
write or truncate will zero large numbers of blocks - tens of
megabytes at a time. The result is that instead of only writing
~10,000 blocks, we write hundreds to thousands of megabytes of zeros
to the file and that is where the difference in runtime is coming
from.

The IO pattern that this test is using does not reflect a common (or
sane!) real-world application IO pattern, so it is really just
exercising the allocation and truncation paths in XFS. To do this,
we don't need large amounts of preallocation beyond EOF that just
slows down the operation, so execute the test with a fixed, small
preallocation size that reflects the previous default.

By specifying the preallocation size via the allocsize mount option,
this also overrides any custom allocsize option provided for the
test, so the test will not revert to extremely long runtimes when
allocsize is provided on the command line.

However, to ensure that we do actually get some coverage of the
zeroing paths, set the allocsize mount option to 64k - this
exercises the EOF zeroing paths, but does not affect the runtime of
the test.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
This commit is contained in:
Dave Chinner
2011-01-07 23:58:50 +11:00
committed by Dave Chinner
parent 815637a2da
commit ae89e0ab92
+6
View File
@@ -50,6 +50,12 @@ _supported_os IRIX Linux
_require_sparse_files
_setup_testdir
# ensure EOF preallocation doesn't massively extend the runtime of this test
# by limiting the amount of preallocation and therefore the amount of blocks
# zeroed during the truncfile test run.
umount $TEST_DIR
_test_mount -o allocsize=64k
echo "brevity is wit..."
echo "------"