* Illumos ZFS issue #3805 arc shouldn't cache freed blocks
Quote from the Illumos issue:
ZFS should proactively evict freed blocks from the cache.
Even though these freed blocks will never be used again, and thus
will eventually be evicted, this causes us to use memory
inefficiently for 2 reasons:
1. A block that is freed has no chance of being accessed again, but
will be kept in memory preferentially to a block that was accessed
before it (and is thus older) but has not been freed and thus has
at least some chance of being accessed again.
2. We partition the ARC into several buckets:
user data that has been accessed only once (MRU)
metadata that has been accessed only once (MRU)
user data that has been accessed more than once (MFU)
metadata that has been accessed more than once (MFU)
The user data vs metadata split is somewhat arbitrary, and the
primary control on how much memory is used to cache data vs metadata
is to simply try to keep the proportion the same as it has been in the
past (each bucket "evicts against" itself). The secondary control is
to evict data before evicting metadata.
Because of this bucketing, we may end up with one bucket mostly
containing freed blocks that are very old, while another bucket has
more recently accessed, still-allocated blocks. Data in the useful
bucket (with still-allocated blocks) may be evicted in preference to
data in the useless bucket (with old, freed blocks).
On dcenter, we saw that the MFU metadata bucket was 230MB, while the
MFU data bucket was 27GB and the MRU metadata bucket was 256GB.
However, the vast majority of data in the MRU metadata bucket (256GB)
was freed blocks, and thus useless. Meanwhile, the MFU metadata bucket
(230MB) was constantly evicting useful blocks that will be soon needed.
The problem of cache segmentation is a larger problem that needs more
investigation. However, if we stop caching freed blocks, it should
reduce the impact of this more fundamental issue.
MFC after: 2 weeks
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