diff --git a/fs/btrfs/space-info.c b/fs/btrfs/space-info.c
index 0e88a1482624e4f42e9ea00020de012716566568..639787beb57aadecbc2e9e031cb2cbe2bed8c2e9 100644
--- a/fs/btrfs/space-info.c
+++ b/fs/btrfs/space-info.c
@@ -864,8 +864,14 @@ static bool need_preemptive_reclaim(struct btrfs_fs_info *fs_info,
 	 * clearly be heavy enough to warrant preemptive flushing.  In the case
 	 * of heavy DIO or ordered reservations, preemptive flushing will just
 	 * waste time and cause us to slow down.
+	 *
+	 * We want to make sure we truly are maxed out on ordered however, so
+	 * cut ordered in half, and if it's still higher than delalloc then we
+	 * can keep flushing.  This is to avoid the case where we start
+	 * flushing, and now delalloc == ordered and we stop preemptively
+	 * flushing when we could still have several gigs of delalloc to flush.
 	 */
-	ordered = percpu_counter_read_positive(&fs_info->ordered_bytes);
+	ordered = percpu_counter_read_positive(&fs_info->ordered_bytes) >> 1;
 	delalloc = percpu_counter_read_positive(&fs_info->delalloc_bytes);
 	if (ordered >= delalloc)
 		used += fs_info->delayed_refs_rsv.reserved +