btrfs: send: avoid trashing the page cache
A send operation reads extent data using the buffered IO path for getting extent data to send in write commands and this is both because it's simple and to make use of the generic readahead infrastructure, which results in a massive speedup. However this fills the page cache with data that, most of the time, is really only used by the send operation - once the write commands are sent, it's not useful to have the data in the page cache anymore. For large snapshots, bringing all data into the page cache eventually leads to the need to evict other data from the page cache that may be more useful for applications (and kernel subsystems). Even if extents are shared with the subvolume on which a snapshot is based on and the data is currently on the page cache due to being read through the subvolume, attempting to read the data through the snapshot will always result in bringing a new copy of the data into another location in the page cache (there's currently no shared memory for shared extents). So make send evict the data it has read before if when it first opened the inode, its mapping had no pages currently loaded: when inode->i_mapping->nr_pages has a value of 0. Do this instead of deciding based on the return value of filemap_range_has_page() before reading an extent because the generic readahead mechanism may read pages beyond the range we request (and it very often does it), which means a call to filemap_range_has_page() will return true due to the readahead that was triggered when processing a previous extent - we don't have a simple way to distinguish this case from the case where the data was brought into the page cache through someone else. So checking for the mapping number of pages being 0 when we first open the inode is simple, cheap and it generally accomplishes the goal of not trashing the page cache - the only exception is if part of data was previously loaded into the page cache through the snapshot by some other process, in that case we end up not evicting any data send brings into the page cache, just like before this change - but that however is not the common case. Example scenario, on a box with 32G of RAM: $ btrfs subvolume create /mnt/sv1 $ xfs_io -f -c "pwrite 0 4G" /mnt/sv1/file1 $ btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /mnt/sv1 /mnt/snap1 $ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31937 186 26866 0 4883 31297 Swap: 8188 0 8188 # After this we get less 4G of free memory. $ btrfs send /mnt/snap1 >/dev/null $ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31937 186 22814 0 8935 31297 Swap: 8188 0 8188 The same, obviously, applies to an incremental send. Signed-off-by: Filipe Manana <fdmanana@suse.com> Reviewed-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com> Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
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