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Recent tests writing lots of small files showed the flusher thread
being CPU bound and taking a long time to do allocations on a debug
kernel. perf showed this as the prime reason:

             samples  pcnt function                    DSO
             _______ _____ ___________________________ _________________

           224648.00 36.8% xfs_error_test              [kernel.kallsyms]
            86045.00 14.1% xfs_btree_check_sblock      [kernel.kallsyms]
            39778.00  6.5% prandom32                   [kernel.kallsyms]
            37436.00  6.1% xfs_btree_increment         [kernel.kallsyms]
            29278.00  4.8% xfs_btree_get_rec           [kernel.kallsyms]
            27717.00  4.5% random32                    [kernel.kallsyms]

Walking btree blocks during allocation checking them requires each
block (a cache hit, so no I/O) call xfs_error_test(), which then
does a random32() call as the first operation.  IOWs, ~50% of the
CPU is bei...