fib_trie implementation calls synchronize_rcu when a certain amount of
pages are dirty from freed entries. The number of pages was determined
experimentally in 2009 (commit c3059477fc).
At the current setting, synchronize_rcu is called often -- 51 times in a
second in one test with an average of an 8 msec delay adding a fib entry.
The total impact is a lot of slow down modifying the fib. This is seen
in the output of 'time' - the difference between real time and sys+user.
For example, using 720,022 single path routes and 'ip -batch'[1]:
$ time ./ip -batch ipv4/routes-1-hops
real 0m14.214s
user 0m2.513s
sys 0m6.783s
So roughly 35% of the actual time to install the routes is from the ip
command getting scheduled out, most notably due to synchronize_rcu (this
is observed using 'perf sched timehist').
This patch makes the amount of dirty memory configurable between 64k where
the synchronize_rcu is called often (small, low end systems that are memory
sensitive) to 64M where synchronize_rcu is called rarely during a large
FIB change (for high end systems with lots of memory). The default is 512kB
which corresponds to the current setting of 128 pages with a 4kB page size.
As an example, at 16MB the worst interval shows 4 calls to synchronize_rcu
in a second blocking for up to 30 msec in a single instance, and a total
of almost 100 msec across the 4 calls in the second. The trade off is
allowing FIB entries to consume more memory in a given time window but
but with much better fib insertion rates (~30% increase in prefixes/sec).
With this patch and net.ipv4.fib_sync_mem set to 16MB, the same batch
file runs in:
$ time ./ip -batch ipv4/routes-1-hops
real 0m9.692s
user 0m2.491s
sys 0m6.769s
So the dead time is reduced to about 1/2 second or <5% of the real time.
[1] 'ip' modified to not request ACK messages which improves route
insertion times by about 20%
Signed-off-by: David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>