ffb4025961
The work of closing a file can have non-trivial cost. Doing it in a separate work queue thread means that cost isn't imposed on the nfsd threads and an imbalance can be created. This can result in files being queued for the work queue more quickly that the work queue can process them, resulting in unbounded growth of the queue and memory exhaustion. To avoid this work imbalance that exhausts memory, this patch moves all closing of files into the nfsd threads. This means that when the work imposes a cost, that cost appears where it would be expected - in the work of the nfsd thread. A subsequent patch will ensure the final __fput() is called in the same (nfsd) thread which calls filp_close(). Files opened for NFSv3 are never explicitly closed by the client and are kept open by the server in the "filecache", which responds to memory pressure, is garbage collected even when there is no pressure, and sometimes closes files when there is particular need such as for rename. These files currently have filp_close() called in a dedicated work queue, so their __fput() can have no effect on nfsd threads. This patch discards the work queue and instead has each nfsd thread call flip_close() on as many as 8 files from the filecache each time it acts on a client request (or finds there are no pending client requests). If there are more to be closed, more threads are woken. This spreads the work of __fput() over multiple threads and imposes any cost on those threads. The number 8 is somewhat arbitrary. It needs to be greater than 1 to ensure that files are closed more quickly than they can be added to the cache. It needs to be small enough to limit the per-request delays that will be imposed on clients when all threads are busy closing files. Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.