Skip to content

Abysmal performance and WARNING: at mm/page_alloc.c #1

@aride

Description

@aride

Hello,

I'm trying NILFS2 1.1-4.el6 on OpenVZ kernel 2.6.32-042stab113.11 on an IBM System x3650 M4 with dual CPU, 64 GB RAM and some hardware-RAID1 array of SAS HDDs with an ext4 filesystem on LVM2 over LUKS. The NILFS2 device is just a loop-mounted file in that ext4 filesystem.

The moment I start copying files with rsync from somewhere on the same filesystem into the NILFS device, I start to get tons of repeating warnings starting with the following text (see attached file):

WARNING: at mm/page_alloc.c:2421 __alloc_pages_nodemask+0xaa/0xbb0()

Files get copied anyway, and NILFS works, but the performance is beyond abysmal. For comparison, I tested the same kernel and module with the same setup on a much smaller IBM System x3250 M3 with a single CPU, only 6 GB RAM and two SATA HDDs in software RAID1 (md), with the same NILFS2-loop-ext4-LVM2-LUKS setup and it works quite well (of course the performance is not great but it's several orders of magnitude greater than I get with the beefier server, so I think something's not right with NILFS).

The warning messages are so many that I wonder if the performance degradation is not effectively caused by them. I tried setting kernel.printk to 0 0 0 0 but still couldn't keep them at bay, although maybe that would be some error on my part or some unrelated bug because I don't know why that wouldn't stop them.

The performance degradation for the whole server was serious, even after lowering the rsync I/O priority with ionice.

Attachment: nilfsbug.txt

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions