ext4: Use readahead when reading an inode from the inode table

With modern hard drives, reading 64k takes roughly the same time as
reading a 4k block.  So request readahead for adjacent inode table
blocks to reduce the time it takes when iterating over directories
(especially when doing this in htree sort order) in a cold cache case.
With this patch, the time it takes to run "git status" on a kernel
tree after flushing the caches via "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
is reduced by 21%.

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

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
index d9ac9706735b..d831d24d2a6c 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
@@ -956,6 +956,9 @@ Table 1-10: Files in /proc/fs/ext4/<devname>
                  files are packed closely together.  Each large file
                  will have its blocks allocated out of its own unique
                  preallocation pool.
+inode_readahead  Tuning parameter which controls the maximum number of
+                 inode table blocks that ext4's inode table readahead
+                 algorithm will pre-read into the buffer cache
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