Date:   Fri, 11 Nov 2016 22:19:37 -0700
From:   Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>
To:     Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
Cc:     Jens Axboe <axboe@...com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-block@...r.kernel.org,
        hch@....de
Subject: Re: [PATCH 6/8] block: add scalable completion tracking of requests

On 11/10/2016 12:38 PM, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Wed 09-11-16 12:52:25, Jens Axboe wrote:
>> On 11/09/2016 09:09 AM, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>> On 11/09/2016 02:01 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>> On Tue 08-11-16 08:25:52, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>>> On 11/08/2016 06:30 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue 01-11-16 15:08:49, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>>>>> For legacy block, we simply track them in the request queue. For
>>>>>>> blk-mq, we track them on a per-sw queue basis, which we can then
>>>>>>> sum up through the hardware queues and finally to a per device
>>>>>>> state.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The stats are tracked in, roughly, 0.1s interval windows.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Add sysfs files to display the stats.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@...com>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This patch looks mostly good to me but I have one concern: You track
>>>>>> statistics in a fixed 134ms window, stats get cleared at the
>>>>>> beginning of
>>>>>> each window. Now this can interact with the writeback window and
>>>>>> latency
>>>>>> settings which are dynamic and settable from userspace - so if the
>>>>>> writeback code observation window gets set larger than the stats
>>>>>> window,
>>>>>> things become strange since you'll likely miss quite some observations
>>>>>> about read latencies. So I think you need to make sure stats window is
>>>>>> always larger than writeback window. Or actually, why do you have
>>>>>> something
>>>>>> like stats window and don't leave clearing of statistics completely
>>>>>> to the
>>>>>> writeback tracking code?
>>>>>
>>>>> That's a good point, and there actually used to be a comment to that
>>>>> effect in the code. I think the best solution here would be to make the
>>>>> stats code mask available somewhere, and allow a consumer of the stats
>>>>> to request a larger window.
>>>>>
>>>>> Similarly, we could make the stat window be driven by the consumer, as
>>>>> you suggest.
>>>>>
>>>>> Currently there are two pending submissions that depend on the stats
>>>>> code. One is this writeback series, and the other one is the hybrid
>>>>> polling code. The latter does not really care about the window size as
>>>>> such, since it has no monitoring window of its own, and it wants the
>>>>> auto-clearing as well.
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't mind working on additions for this, but I'd prefer if we could
>>>>> layer them on top of the existing series instead of respinning it.
>>>>> There's considerable test time on the existing patchset. Would that work
>>>>> for you? Especially collapsing the stats and wbt windows would require
>>>>> some re-architecting.
>>>>
>>>> OK, that works for me. Actually, when thinking about this, I have one
>>>> more
>>>> suggestion: Do we really want to expose the wbt window as a sysfs
>>>> tunable?
>>>> I guess it is good for initial experiments but longer term having the wbt
>>>> window length be a function of target read latency might be better.
>>>> Generally you want the window length to be considerably larger than the
>>>> target latency but OTOH not too large so that the algorithm can react
>>>> reasonably quickly so that suggests it could really be autotuned (and we
>>>> scale the window anyway to adapt it to current situation).
>>>
>>> That's not a bad idea, I have thought about that as well before. We
>>> don't need the window tunable, and you are right, it can be a function
>>> of the desired latency.
>>>
>>> I'll hardwire the 100msec latency window for now and get rid of the
>>> exposed tunable. It's harder to remove sysfs files once they have made
>>> it into the kernel...
>>
>> Killed the sysfs variable, so for now it'll be a 100msec window by
>> default.
>
> OK, I guess good enough to get this merged.

Thanks Jan!

-- 
Jens Axboe

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