ext4: avoid unnecessary transaction stalls during writeback
Currently ext4_writepages() submits all pages with transaction started.
When no page needs block allocation or extent conversion we can submit
all dirty pages in the inode while holding a single transaction handle
and when device is congested this can take significant amount of time.
Thus ext4_writepages() can block transaction commits for extended
periods of time.
Take for example a simple benchmark simulating PostgreSQL database
(pgioperf in mmtest). The benchmark runs 16 processes doing random reads
from a huge file, one process doing random writes to the huge file, and
one process doing sequential writes to a small files and frequently
running fsync. With unpatched kernel transaction commits take on average
~18s with standard deviation of ~41s, top 5 commit times are:
[ Modified so we use an explicit do_map flag instead of relying on
io_end not being allocated, the since io_end->inode is needed for I/O
error handling. -- tytso ]
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>