Re: [RFC] cfq: adapt slice to number of processes doing I/O

[Corrado Zoccolo <czoccolo@gmail.com>]

Hi Jens,
On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Jens Axboe<jens.axboe@oracle.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 03 2009, Jeff Moyer wrote:
>> Corrado Zoccolo <czoccolo@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > When the number of processes performing I/O concurrently increases,  a
>> > fixed time slice per process will cause large latencies.
>> > In the patch, if there are more than 3 processes performing concurrent
>> > I/O, we scale the time slice down proportionally.
>> > To safeguard sequential bandwidth, we impose a minimum time slice,
>> > computed from cfq_slice_idle (the idea is that cfq_slice_idle
>> > approximates the cost for a seek).
>> >
>> > I performed two tests, on a rotational disk:
>> > * 32 concurrent processes performing random reads
>> > ** the bandwidth is improved from 466KB/s to 477KB/s
>> > ** the maximum latency is reduced from 7.667s to 1.728
>> > * 32 concurrent processes performing sequential reads
>> > ** the bandwidth is reduced from 28093KB/s to 24393KB/s
>> > ** the maximum latency is reduced from 3.781s to 1.115s
>> >
>> > I expect numbers to be even better on SSDs, where the penalty to
>> > disrupt sequential read is much less.
>>
>> Interesting approach.  I'm not sure what the benefits will be on SSDs,
>> as the idling logic is disabled for them (when nonrot is set and they
>> support ncq).  See cfq_arm_slice_timer.
>
> Also, the problem with scaling the slice a lot is that throughput has a
> tendency to fall off a cliff at some point.

This is the reason that I have a minimum slice. It is already reached
for 32 processes as in my example, so the throughput drop is at most
20%.
Currently it is computed as 2*slice_idle for sync, and 1*slice_idle
for async queues.
I think this causes the leveling of data transferred regardless of
priorities. I'll cook up a formula to better scale also the minimum
slice according to priority, to fix this issue.

> Have you tried benchmarking
> buffered writes with reads?

Yes. I used that workload for benchmarks while tuning the patch.
Adding async writes doesn't change the results, mostly because cfq
preempts async queues when sync queues have new requests, and with
many readers, there are always plenty of incoming reads. Writes almost
have no chance to happen.

Corrado

>
> --
> Jens Axboe
>
>



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dott. Corrado Zoccolo                          mailto:czoccolo@gmail.com
PhD - Department of Computer Science - University of Pisa, Italy
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