Date:	Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:24:50 -0400
From:	Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com>
To:	Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>
Cc:	Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@...hat.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] cfq: allow dispatching of both sync and async I/O
 together

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:21:18PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 2010-06-22 15:18, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 08:45:54AM -0400, Jeff Moyer wrote:
> >> Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com> writes:
> >>
> >>> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 07:22:08PM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> >>>> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 09:59:48PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> >>>>> On 21/06/10 21.49, Jeff Moyer wrote:
> >>>>>> Hi,
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> In testing a workload that has a single fsync-ing process and another
> >>>>>> process that does a sequential buffered read, I was unable to tune CFQ
> >>>>>> to reach the throughput of deadline.  This patch, along with the previous
> >>>>>> one, brought CFQ in line with deadline when setting slice_idle to 0.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I'm not sure what the original reason for not allowing sync and async
> >>>>>> I/O to be dispatched together was.  If there is a workload I should be
> >>>>>> testing that shows the inherent problems of this, please point me at it
> >>>>>> and I will resume testing.  Until and unless that workload is identified,
> >>>>>> please consider applying this patch.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> The problematic case is/was a normal SATA drive with a buffered
> >>>>> writer and an occasional reader. I'll have to double check my
> >>>>> mail tomorrow, but iirc the issue was that the occasional reader
> >>>>> would suffer great latencies since service times for that single
> >>>>> IO would be delayed at the drive side. It could perhaps just be
> >>>>> a bug in how we handle the slice idling on the read side when the
> >>>>> IO gets delayed initially.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> So if my memory is correct, google for the fsync madness and
> >>>>> interactiveness thread that we had some months ago and which
> >>>>> caused a lot of tweaking. The commit adding this is
> >>>>> 5ad531db6e0f3c3c985666e83d3c1c4d53acccf9 and was added back
> >>>>> in July last year. So it was around that time that the mails went
> >>>>> around.
> >>>>
> >>>> Hi Jens,
> >>>>
> >>>> I suspect we might have introduced this patch because mike galbraith
> >>>> had issues which application interactiveness (reading data back from swap)
> >>>> in the prence of heavy writeout on SATA disk.
> >>>>
> >>>> After this patch we did two enhancements.
> >>>>
> >>>> - You introduced the logic of building write queue depth gradually.
> >>>> - Corrado introduced the logic of idling on the random reader service
> >>>>   tree.
> >>>>
> >>>> In the past random reader were not protected from WRITES as there was no
> >>>> idling on random readers. But with corrado's changes of idling on
> >>>> sync-noidle service tree, I think this problem might have been solved to
> >>>> a great extent.
> >>>>
> >>>> Getting rid of this exclusivity of either SYNC/ASYNC requests in request
> >>>> queue might help us with throughput on storage arrys without loosing
> >>>> protection for random reader on SATA. 
> >>>>
> >>>> I will do some testing with and without patch and see if above is true
> >>>> or not.
> >>>
> >>> Some primilinary testing results with and without patch. I started a
> >>> buffered writer and started firefox and monitored how much time firefox
> >>> took.
> >>>
> >>> dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile bs=4K count=1024M
> >>>
> >>> 2.6.35-rc3 vanilla
> >>> ==================
> >>> real    0m22.546s
> >>> user    0m0.566s
> >>> sys     0m0.107s
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> real    0m21.410s
> >>> user    0m0.527s
> >>> sys     0m0.095s
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> real    0m27.594s
> >>> user    0m1.256s
> >>> sys     0m0.483s
> >>>
> >>> 2.6.35-rc3 + jeff's patches
> >>> ===========================
> >>> real    0m20.372s
> >>> user    0m0.635s
> >>> sys     0m0.128s
> >>>
> >>> real    0m22.281s
> >>> user    0m0.509s
> >>> sys     0m0.093s
> >>>
> >>> real    0m23.211s
> >>> user    0m0.674s
> >>> sys     0m0.140s
> >>>
> >>> So looks like firefox launching times have not changed much in the presence
> >>> of heavy buffered writting going on root disk. I will do more testing tomorrow.
> >>
> >> Was the buffered writer actually hitting disk?  How much memory is on
> >> your system?
> > 
> > I have 4G of memory in the system. I used to wait for 10-15 seconds after
> > writer has started and then launch firefox to make sure writes are actually
> > hitting the disk.
> > 
> > Are you seeing different results in your testing?
> 
> Just to be sure, this is a regular SATA drive that has NCQ enabled and
> running? Apart from that comment, the test sounds good - dirty lots of
> memory and ensure that it's writing, then start the reader. Should be
> worst case for the reader. Sadly, both the before and after timings
> are pretty horrible :-/

This is Western Digital SATA disk. It has NCQ enabled. I see 31 in
/sys/block/<dev>/device/queue_depth. Is there another way to verify that.

I also did a blktrace and I see that many a times we are driving deeper
queue depths. So it confirms that this drive has NCQ enabled.

8,64   0        0     2.530368587     0  m   N cfq2024A / activate rq, drv=16
8,64   0        0     2.531402018     0  m   N cfq2024A / activate rq, drv=16
8,64   0        0     2.534765229     0  m   N cfq2024A / activate rq, drv=16

Setting the queue_depth=1 helps a bit and firefox launches in around 17-18
seconds.

Without any competing workload, firefox launches in around 6 seconds.

I guess the best way to deal with SATA disk is to set queue_depth=1 in 
/sys.

Thanks
Vivek
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