The flusher picks the memtable list which contains the largest region
according to region_impl::evictable_occupancy().total_space(), which
follows region::occupancy().total_space(). But only the latest
memtable in the list can start flushing. It can happen that the
memtable corresponding to the largest region was already flushed to an
sstable (flush permit released), but not yet fsynced or moved to
cache, so it's still in the memtable list.
The latest memtable in the winning list may be small, or empty, in
which case the soft pressure flusher will not be able to make much
progress. There could be other memtable lists with non-empty
(flushable) latest memtables. This can lead to writes unnecessarily
blocking on dirty.
I observed this for the system memtable group, where it's easy for the
memtables to overshoot small soft pressure limits. The flusher kept
trying to flush empty memtables, while the previous non-empty memtable
was still in the group.
The CPU scheduler makes this worse, because it runs memtable_to_cache
in a separate scheduling group, so it further defers in time the
removal of the flushed memtable from the memtable list.
This patch fixes the problem by making regions corresponding to
memtables which started flushing report evictable_occupancy() as 0, so
that they're picked by the flusher last.
Fixes#3716.
Message-Id: <1535040132-11153-2-git-send-email-tgrabiec@scylladb.com>
(cherry picked from commit 1e50f85288)
01165a9ae7