ext4: add fsync batch tuning knobs

Add new mount options, min_batch_time and max_batch_time, which
controls how long the jbd2 layer should wait for additional filesystem
operations to get batched with a synchronous write transaction.

Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>

1 files changed, 29 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
index f75ab10..e3fcbea 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4.txt
@@ -283,6 +283,35 @@ delalloc	(*)	Deferring block allocation until write-out time.
 nodelalloc		Disable delayed allocation. Blocks are allocation
 			when data is copied from user to page cache.
 
+max_batch_time=usec	Maximum amount of time ext4 should wait for
+			additional filesystem operations to be batch
+			together with a synchronous write operation.
+			Since a synchronous write operation is going to
+			force a commit and then a wait for the I/O
+			complete, it doesn't cost much, and can be a
+			huge throughput win, we wait for a small amount
+			of time to see if any other transactions can
+			piggyback on the synchronous write.   The
+			algorithm used is designed to automatically tune
+			for the speed of the disk, by measuring the
+			amount of time (on average) that it takes to
+			finish committing a transaction.  Call this time
+			the "commit time".  If the time that the
+			transactoin has been running is less than the
+			commit time, ext4 will try sleeping for the
+			commit time to see if other operations will join
+			the transaction.   The commit time is capped by
+			the max_batch_time, which defaults to 15000us
+			(15ms).   This optimization can be turned off
+			entirely by setting max_batch_time to 0.
+
+min_batch_time=usec	This parameter sets the commit time (as
+			described above) to be at least min_batch_time.
+			It defaults to zero microseconds.  Increasing
+			this parameter may improve the throughput of
+			multi-threaded, synchronous workloads on very
+			fast disks, at the cost of increasing latency.
+
 Data Mode
 =========
 There are 3 different data modes: