When batching more updates to the activity log into single transactions,
we lost the ability for new requests to force themselves into the active
set: all preparation steps became non-blocking, and if all currently
hot extents keep busy, they could starve out new incoming requests
to cold extents for quite a while.
This can only happen if your IO backend accepts more IO operations per
average DRBD replication round trip time than you have al-extents
configured.
If we have incoming requests to cold extents,
at least do one blocking update per transaction.
In an artificial worst-case workload on SSD with an asynchronous 600 ms
replication link, with al-extents = 7 (the minimum we allow), and
concurrent full resynch, without this patch, some write requests have
been observed to be starved for 40 seconds.
With this patch, application observed a worst case latency of twice the
replication round trip time.
Signed-off-by: Philipp Reisner <philipp.reisner@linbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Lars Ellenberg <lars.ellenberg@linbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
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