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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