InnoDB Page Cleaner intended loop takes too long

Recently we migrated a database system from MySQL 5.7 to MariaDB 10.3. Everything went fine so far just the following message started to pop-up in the MariaDB Error Log File with the severity Note:

InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4674ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=102 and evicted=0, during the time.)

I remember that this message also appeared in earlier MySQL 5.7 releases but somehow disappeared in later releases. I assume MySQL has just disabled the Note?

You can find various advices in the Internet about how to get rid of this Note:

innodb_lru_scan_depth        = 1024, 256
innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 1, 8
innodb_io_capcity            = 100, 200 or 1000
innodb_page_cleaners         = 1, 4 or 8

But non of these changes made the Note go away in our case. I only found one voice claiming it could be an external reason which makes this message appear. Because we are actually running on a Cloud-Machine the appearance of this message could really be an effect of the Cloud and not caused by the Database or the Application.

We further know that our MariaDB Database has a more or less uniform workload over the day. Further it is a Master/Master (active/passive) set-up. So both nodes should see more or less the same write load at the same time.

But as our investigation clearly shows that the Note does not appear at the same time on both nodes. So I strongly assume it is a noisy-neighbour problem.

First we tried to find any trend or correlation between these 2 Master/Master Databases maas1 and maas2:

What we can see here is, that the message appeared on different days on maas1 and maas2. The database maas1 had a problem in the beginning of December and end of January. Database maas1 had much less problems in general but end of December there was a problem.

During night both instances seem to have less problems than during the day. And maas2 has more problems in the afternoon and evening.

If we look at the distribution per minute we can see that maas2 has some problems around xx:45 to xx:50 and maas1 more at xx:15.

Then we had a closer look at 28 January at about 12:00 to 15:00 on maas2:

We cannot see any anomalies which would explain a huge increase of dirty pages and and a page_cleaner stuck.

The only thing we could see at the specified time is that I/O latency significantly increased on server side. Because we did not cause more load and over-saturated the system it must be triggered externally:

This correlates quite well to the Notes we see in the MariaDB Error Log on maas2:

2020-01-28 12:45:27 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5760ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=101 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:46:00 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 6908ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=4 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:46:32 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5339ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=17 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:47:36 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4379ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=101 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:48:08 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5053ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=7 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:48:42 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5760ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=102 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:49:38 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4202ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=100 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:57:28 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4615ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=18 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:58:01 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5593ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=4 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:58:34 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5442ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=101 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 12:59:31 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4327ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=101 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:00:05 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5154ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=82 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:08:01 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4321ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=4 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:10:46 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 21384ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=100 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:14:16 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4180ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=20 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:14:49 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4935ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=4 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:15:20 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4472ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=25 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:15:47 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4358ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=9 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:48:31 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 6212ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=9 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:55:44 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4280ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=101 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 13:59:43 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5817ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=4 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:00:16 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 5384ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=100 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:00:52 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 9460ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=5 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:01:25 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 7727ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=103 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:01:57 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 7154ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=5 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:02:29 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 7501ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=5 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:03:00 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4322ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=78 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:32:02 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4927ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=4 and evicted=0, during the time.)
2020-01-28 14:32:34 0 [Note] InnoDB: page_cleaner: 1000ms intended loop took 4506ms. The settings might not be optimal. (flushed=101 and evicted=0, during the time.)