linux-kernel - Re: Slow file transfer speeds with CFQ IO scheduler in some cases

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Date:	Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:14:12 +0300
From:	Vladislav Bolkhovitin <vst@...b.net>
To:	Wu Fengguang <wfg@...ux.intel.com>
CC:	Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@...cle.com>, Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@...hat.com>,
	"Vitaly V. Bursov" <vitalyb@...enet.dn.ua>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-nfs@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Slow file transfer speeds with CFQ IO scheduler in some cases

Vladislav Bolkhovitin, on 02/17/2009 10:03 PM wrote:
> Wu Fengguang, on 02/16/2009 05:34 AM wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:08:25PM +0300, Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote:
>>> Wu Fengguang, on 02/13/2009 04:57 AM wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 09:35:18PM +0300, Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote:
>>>>> Sorry for such a huge delay. There were many other activities I had 
>>>>> to  do before + I had to be sure I didn't miss anything.
>>>>>
>>>>> We didn't use NFS, we used SCST (http://scst.sourceforge.net) with   
>>>>> iSCSI-SCST target driver. It has similar to NFS architecture, where N 
>>>>>  threads (N=5 in this case) handle IO from remote initiators 
>>>>> (clients)  coming from wire using iSCSI protocol. In addition, SCST 
>>>>> has patch  called export_alloc_io_context (see   
>>>>> http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/10/282), which allows for the IO threads 
>>>>>  queue IO using single IO context, so we can see if context RA can   
>>>>> replace grouping IO threads in single IO context.
>>>>>
>>>>> Unfortunately, the results are negative. We find neither any 
>>>>> advantages  of context RA over current RA implementation, nor 
>>>>> possibility for  context RA to replace grouping IO threads in single 
>>>>> IO context.
>>>>>
>>>>> Setup on the target (server) was the following. 2 SATA drives grouped 
>>>>> in  md RAID-0 with average local read throughput ~120MB/s ("dd 
>>>>> if=/dev/zero  of=/dev/md0 bs=1M count=20000" outputs "20971520000 
>>>>> bytes (21 GB)  copied, 177,742 s, 118 MB/s"). The md device was 
>>>>> partitioned on 3  partitions. The first partition was 10% of space in 
>>>>> the beginning of the  device, the last partition was 10% of space in 
>>>>> the end of the device,  the middle one was the rest in the middle of 
>>>>> the space them. Then the  first and the last partitions were exported 
>>>>> to the initiator (client).  They were /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc on it 
>>>>> correspondingly.
>>>> Vladislav, Thank you for the benchmarks! I'm very interested in
>>>> optimizing your workload and figuring out what happens underneath.
>>>>
>>>> Are the client and server two standalone boxes connected by GBE?
>>> Yes, they directly connected using GbE.
>>>
>>>> When you set readahead sizes in the benchmarks, you are setting them
>>>> in the server side? I.e. "linux-4dtq" is the SCST server?
>>> Yes, it's the server. On the client all the parameters were left default.
>>>
>>>> What's the
>>>> client side readahead size?
>>> Default, i.e. 128K
>>>
>>>> It would help a lot to debug readahead if you can provide the
>>>> server side readahead stats and trace log for the worst case.
>>>> This will automatically answer the above questions as well as disclose
>>>> the micro-behavior of readahead:
>>>>
>>>>         mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug
>>>>
>>>>         echo > /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/stats # reset counters
>>>>         # do benchmark
>>>>         cat /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/stats
>>>>
>>>>         echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/trace_enable
>>>>         # do micro-benchmark, i.e. run the same benchmark for a short time
>>>>         echo 0 > /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/trace_enable
>>>>         dmesg
>>>>
>>>> The above readahead trace should help find out how the client side
>>>> sequential reads convert into server side random reads, and how we can
>>>> prevent that.
>>> We will do it as soon as we have a free window on that system.
>> Thank you. For NFS, the client side read/readahead requests will be
>> split into units of rsize which will be served by a pool of nfsd
>> concurrently and possibly out of order. Does SCST have the same
>> process? If so, what's the rsize value for your SCST benchmarks?
> 
> No, there is no such splitting in SCST. Client sees raw SCSI disks from 
> server and what client sends is directly and in full size sent by the 
> server to its backstorage using regular buffered read() 
> (fd->f_op->aio_read() followed by 
> wait_on_retry_sync_kiocb()/wait_on_sync_kiocb() to be precise).

Update. We ran the same tests with deadline I/O scheduler and had 
roughly the same results as with CFQ, see attachment.

> Thanks,
> Vlad
> 
> 


View attachment "2.6.27.12-except_export+readahead-4M-deadline.txt" of type "text/plain" (2395 bytes)