broke in two ways. One, the pacing variable was accessed in multiple
threads in an unsafe way. Two, since large numbers of I/O could come
down from the buf layer at one time, large numbers of allocation
failures could happen all at once, resulting in a huge pace value that
would limit I/Os to 10 IOPS for minutes (or even hours) at a
time. While a real solution to these problems requires substantial
work (to go to a no-allocation after the first model, or to have some
way to wait for more memory with some kind of reserve for pager and
swapper requests), it is relatively easy to make this simplistic
pacing less pathological.
Move to using a volatile variable with loads and stores. While this is
a little racy, losing the race is safe: either you get memory and
proceed, or you don't and queue. Second, sleep for 1ms (or one tick, whichever
is larger) instead of 100ms. This removes the artificial 10 IOPS limit
while still easing up on new I/Os during memory shortages. Remove
tying the amount of time we do this to the number of failed requests
and do it only as long as we keep failing requests.
Finally, to avoid needless recursion when memory is tight (start ->
g_io_deliver() -> g_io_request() -> start -> ... until we use 1/2 the
stack), don't do direct dispatch while pacing. This should be a rare
event (not steady state) so the performance hit here is worth the
extra safety of not starving g_down() with directly dispatched I/O.
Differential Review: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D3546
3f2e5b8584