Filesystem operations slower in 13.0 than 12.2

[Mark Millard]

On 2021-Mar-14, at 11:09, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com> wrote:

> . . .
>  
> Seems to only occur on large r/w operations from/to the same disk. "sp
> big-file /other/file/on/same/disk" or tar/untar operations on large files.
> Hit this today updating firefox.
> 
> I/O starts at >40MB/s. Dropped to about 1.5MB/s. If I tried doing other
> things while it was running slowly, the disk would appear to lock up. E.g.
> pwd(1) seemed to completely lock up the system, but I could still ping it
> and, after about 30 seconds, things came back to life. It was also not
> instantaneous. Disc activity dropped to <1MB/s for a few seconds before
> everything froze.
> 
> During the untar of firefox, I saw; this several times. I also looked at my
> console where I found these errors during :
> swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 55043, size: 8192
> swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 51572, size: 4096

Does anyone know:
Are those messages normal "reading is taking a rather long
time" notices or is their presence more useful information
in some way about the type of problem or context for the
problem?

As for the tests:
Are these messages always present when near a time frame
when the problem occurs? Never present in a near time
frame to a period when the problem does not occur?

It appears that the messages are associated with reading
the disk(s), not directly with writing them, where the
reads take more than "hz * 20" time units to complete.
(I'm looking at main (14) code.) What might contribute
to the time taken for the pending read(s)?

/*
 * swap_pager_getpages() - bring pages in from swap
 *
 *      Attempt to page in the pages in array "ma" of length "count".  The
 *      caller may optionally specify that additional pages preceding and
 *      succeeding the specified range be paged in.  The number of such pages
 *      is returned in the "rbehind" and "rahead" parameters, and they will
 *      be in the inactive queue upon return.
 *
 *      The pages in "ma" must be busied and will remain busied upon return.
 */
static int
swap_pager_getpages_locked(vm_object_t object, vm_page_t *ma, int count,
    int *rbehind, int *rahead)
{
. . .
        /*
         * Wait for the pages we want to complete.  VPO_SWAPINPROG is always
         * cleared on completion.  If an I/O error occurs, SWAPBLK_NONE
         * is set in the metadata for each page in the request.
         */
        VM_OBJECT_WLOCK(object);
        /* This could be implemented more efficiently with aflags */
        while ((ma[0]->oflags & VPO_SWAPINPROG) != 0) {
                ma[0]->oflags |= VPO_SWAPSLEEP;
                VM_CNT_INC(v_intrans);
                if (VM_OBJECT_SLEEP(object, &object->handle, PSWP,
                    "swread", hz * 20)) {
                        printf(
"swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: %p, blkno: %jd, size: %ld\n",
                            bp->b_bufobj, (intmax_t)bp->b_blkno, bp->b_bcount);
                }
        }
        VM_OBJECT_WUNLOCK(object);
. . .

where:

#define VM_OBJECT_SLEEP(object, wchan, pri, wmesg, timo)                \
        rw_sleep((wchan), &(object)->lock, (pri), (wmesg), (timo))

and:

#define rw_sleep(chan, rw, pri, wmesg, timo)                            \
        _sleep((chan), &(rw)->lock_object, (pri), (wmesg),              \
            tick_sbt * (timo), 0, C_HARDCLOCK)

(I do not claim to be able to interpret the implications
of the code that leads to the messages. But seeing some
of the code might prompt a thought by someone that knows
the code's context and operation.)

> . . .
> Backing off to Mar. 4 was not an improvement. My untar did seem better for a couple of minutes, but then the display froze again for 30 seconds and disk performance dropped to <1M.

You were able to see the disk performance drop while
the display was frozen?

It might not be the best for monitoring but I'll ask
this in terms of top output: Does Inact, Laundry,
Wired, Free, or other such show anything fairly unique
for around the problematical time frame(s)?

> then things got really bad and behaved in a manner that was baffling to me. The screen froze again, but stayed frozen after half a minute. I clicked on a couple of buttons in Firefox to no effect and then hit ctrl-q to quit. After the long pause, I pressed the power button to try to force a shutdown. Suddenly, it started unwinding everything I had done during the freeze. My browser did the updates from my mouse clicks including quitting. It then switched to a different workspace from ctrl-alt-right and did a clean shutdown. ???? 
> 
> Do I also have a graphics issue? Examining log files show no indication that anything was happening. SMART shows no errors and reasonable values for everything. No indication of a HW problem. The system performs well unless I do something that tries a bulk disk data move. Building world takes about 75 minutes. I just have a very hard time building big ports.

Almost like things were stuck-sleeping and then the
sleep(s) finished?


===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)