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 f75ab101c00a..e3fcbea3ec8c 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: