$ sysctl -a | grep dirty vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10 vm.dirty_background_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_ratio = 20 vm.dirty_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000
vm.dirty_background_ratio is the percentage of system memory that can be filled with “dirty” pages — memory pages that still need to be written to disk — before the pdflush/flush/kdmflush background processes kick in to write it to disk. My example is 10%, so if my virtual server has 32 GB of memory that’s 3.2 GB of data that can be sitting in RAM before something is done.
vm.dirty_ratio is the absolute maximum amount of system memory that can be filled with dirty pages before everything must get committed to disk. When the system gets to this point all new I/O blocks until dirty pages have been written to disk. This is often the source of long I/O pauses, but is a safeguard against too much data being cached unsafely in memory.
vm.dirty_background_bytes and vm.dirty_bytes are another way to specify these parameters. If you set the _bytes version the _ratio version will become 0, and vice-versa.
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs is how long something can be in cache before it needs to be written. In this case it’s 30 seconds. When the pdflush/flush/kdmflush processes kick in they will check to see how old a dirty page is, and if it’s older than this value it’ll be written asynchronously to disk. Since holding a dirty page in memory is unsafe this is also a safeguard against data loss.
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs is how often the pdflush/flush/kdmflush processes wake up and check to see if work needs to be done.
You can also see statistics on the page cache in /proc/vmstat:
$ cat /proc/vmstat | egrep "dirty|writeback" nr_dirty 878 nr_writeback 0 nr_writeback_temp 0
In my case I have 878 dirty pages waiting to be written to disk.
Approach 1: Decreasing the Cache
As with most things in the computer world, how you adjust these depends on what you’re trying to do. In many cases we have fast disk subsystems with their own big, battery-backed NVRAM caches, so keeping things in the OS page cache is risky. Let’s try to send I/O to the array in a more timely fashion and reduce the chance our local OS will, to borrow a phrase from the service industry, be “in the weeds.” To do this we lower vm.dirty_background_ratio and vm.dirty_ratio by adding new numbers to /etc/sysctl.conf and reloading with “sysctl –p”:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5 vm.dirty_ratio = 10
This is a typical approach on virtual machines, as well as Linux-based hypervisors. I wouldn’t suggest setting these parameters to zero, as some background I/O is nice to decouple application performance from short periods of higher latency on your disk array & SAN (“spikes”).
Approach 2: Increasing the Cache
There are scenarios where raising the cache dramatically has positive effects on performance. These situations are where the data contained on a Linux guest isn’t critical and can be lost, and usually where an application is writing to the same files repeatedly or in repeatable bursts. In theory, by allowing more dirty pages to exist in memory you’ll rewrite the same blocks over and over in cache, and just need to do one write every so often to the actual disk. To do this we raise the parameters:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 50 vm.dirty_ratio = 80
Sometimes folks also increase the vm.dirty_expire_centisecs parameter to allow more time in cache. Beyond the increased risk of data loss, you also run the risk of long I/O pauses if that cache gets full and needs to destage, because on large VMs there will be a lot of data in cache.
Approach 3: Both Ways
There are also scenarios where a system has to deal with infrequent, bursty traffic to slow disk (batch jobs at the top of the hour, midnight, writing to an SD card on a Raspberry Pi, etc.). In that case an approach might be to allow all that write I/O to be deposited in the cache so that the background flush operations can deal with it asynchronously over time:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5 vm.dirty_ratio = 80
Here the background processes will start writing right away when it hits that 5% ceiling but the system won’t force synchronous I/O until it gets to 80% full. From there you just size your system RAM and vm.dirty_ratio to be able to consume all the written data. Again, there are tradeoffs with data consistency on disk, which translates into risk to data. Buy a UPS and make sure you can destage cache before the UPS runs out of power. :)
No matter the route you choose you should always be gathering hard data to support your changes and help you determine if you are improving things or making them worse. In this case you can get data from many different places, including the application itself, /proc/vmstat, /proc/meminfo, iostat, vmstat, and many of the things in /proc/sys/vm. Good luck!
有关Cache
文件缓存是提升性能的重要手段。毋庸置疑，读缓存（Read caching）在绝大多数情况下是有益无害的（程序可以直接从RAM中读取数据），而写缓存(Write caching)则相对复杂。Linux内核将写磁盘的操作分解成了，先写缓存，每隔一段时间再异步地将缓存写入磁盘。这提升了IO读写的速度，但存在一定风险。数据没有及时写入磁盘，所以存在数据丢失的风险。
同样，也存在cache被写爆的情况。还可能出现一次性往磁盘写入过多数据，以致使系统卡顿。之所以卡顿，是因为系统认为，缓存太大用异步的方式来不及把它们都写进磁盘，于是切换到同步的方式写入。（异步，即写入的同时进程能正常运行；同步，即写完之前其他进程不能工作）。
好消息是，你可以根据实际情况，对写缓存进行配置。
可以看一下这些参数：
[root@host ~]# sysctl -a | grep dirty vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10vm.dirty_background_bytes = 0vm.dirty_ratio = 20vm.dirty_bytes = 0vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000
vm.dirty_background_ratio 是内存可以填充“脏数据”的百分比。这些“脏数据”在稍后是会写入磁盘的，pdflush/flush/kdmflush这些后台进程会稍后清理脏数据。举一个例子，我有32G内存，那么有3.2G的内存可以待着内存里，超过3.2G的话就会有后来进程来清理它。
vm.dirty_ratio 是绝对的脏数据限制，内存里的脏数据百分比不能超过这个值。如果脏数据超过这个数量，新的IO请求将会被阻挡，直到脏数据被写进磁盘。这是造成IO卡顿的重要原因，但这也是保证内存中不会存在过量脏数据的保护机制。
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs 指定脏数据能存活的时间。在这里它的值是30秒。当 pdflush/flush/kdmflush 进行起来时，它会检查是否有数据超过这个时限，如果有则会把它异步地写到磁盘中。毕竟数据在内存里待太久也会有丢失风险。
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs 指定多长时间 pdflush/flush/kdmflush 这些进程会起来一次。
可以通过下面方式看内存中有多少脏数据：
[root@host ~]# cat /proc/vmstat | egrep "dirty|writeback"nr_dirty 69nr_writeback 0nr_writeback_temp 0
这说明了，我有69页的脏数据要写到磁盘里。
情景1：减少Cache
你可以针对要做的事情，来制定一个合适的值。
在一些情况下，我们有快速的磁盘子系统，它们有自带的带备用电池的NVRAM caches，这时候把数据放在操作系统层面就显得相对高风险了。所以我们希望系统更及时地往磁盘写数据。
可以在/etc/sysctl.conf中加入下面两行，并执行"sysctl -p"
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5vm.dirty_ratio = 10
这是虚拟机的典型应用。不建议将它设置成0，毕竟有点后台IO可以提升一些程序的性能。
情景2：增加Cache
在一些场景中增加Cache是有好处的。例如，数据不重要丢了也没关系，而且有程序重复地读写一个文件。允许更多的cache，你可以更多地在内存上进行读写，提高速度。
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 50vm.dirty_ratio = 80
有时候还会提高vm.dirty_expire_centisecs 这个参数的值，来允许脏数据更长时间地停留。
情景3：增减兼有
有时候系统需要应对突如其来的高峰数据，它可能会拖慢磁盘。（比如说，每个小时开始时进行的批量操作等）
这个时候需要容许更多的脏数据存到内存，让后台进程慢慢地通过异步方式将数据写到磁盘当中。
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5vm.dirty_ratio = 80
这个时候，后台进行在脏数据达到5%时就开始异步清理，但在80%之前系统不会强制同步写磁盘。这样可以使IO变得更加平滑。
这是一个在客户现场碰到的问题，问题很简单，但是之前没有碰到过，大概是在readhat上装数据库较少吧，记录一下：
客户有一台服务器，安装了VMW软件做了虚拟化，在其上搭建了一台readhat虚拟机，起初给的内存为16G，在添加了12G的内存后，将虚拟机的内存调整到了20G
调整完后主机这边就一直报错：
Nov 5 13:05:41 RedHat5 kernel: INFO: task oracle:22439 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
Nov 5 13:05:41 RedHat5 kernel: “echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs” disables this message.
查询了资料后对于该参数的了解为后台对进行的任务由于超时而挂起
从以上的报错信息也给出了简单的解决方案，就是禁止该120秒的超时：echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs
随后询问了主机工程师：给出方案是按照告警里的提示将该提醒disable
后续询问后给出如下解释：
This is a know bug. By default Linux uses up to 40% of the available memory for file system caching.
After this mark has been reached the file system flushes all outstanding
data to disk causing all following IOs going synchronous.
For flushing out this data to disk this there is a time limit of 120 seconds by default.
In the case here the IO subsystem is not fast enough to flush the data withing 120 seconds.
This especially happens on systems with a lof of memory.
The problem is solved in later kernels and there is not “fix” from Oracle.
I fixed this by lowering the mark for flushing the cache from 40% to 10% by setting “vm.dirty_ratio=10″ in /etc/sysctl.conf.
This setting does not influence overall database performance since you
hopefully use Direct IO and bypass the file system cache completely.
告知是linux会设置40%的可用内存用来做系统cache，当flush数据时这40%内存中的数据由于和IO同步问题导致超时（120s），所将40%减小到10%，避免超时。
