linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH 1/2] fs: Do not dispatch FITRIM through separate super

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Message-ID: <x49wro9za7f.fsf@segfault.boston.devel.redhat.com>
Date:	Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:58:44 -0500
From:	Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@...hat.com>
To:	Mark Lord <kernel@...savvy.com>
Cc:	"Ted Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...e.de>,
	Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@...il.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Matthew Wilcox <matthew@....cx>,
	Josef Bacik <josef@...hat.com>,
	Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com>,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, sandeen@...hat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] fs: Do not dispatch FITRIM through separate super_operation

Mark Lord <kernel@...savvy.com> writes:

> On 10-11-18 08:33 PM, Ted Ts'o wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Before we go gung ho on this, there's no evidence that N discontiguous
>>>> ranges in one command are any better than the ranges sent N times ...
>>>> the same amount of erase overhead gets sent on SSDs.
>>>
>>> No, we do have evidence:  execution time of the TRIM commands on the SSD.
>>>
>>> The one-range-at-a-time is incredibly slow compared to multiple
>>> ranges at a time.  That slowness comes from somewhere, with about
>>> 99.9% certainty that it is due to the drive performing slow flash
>>> erase cycles.
>>
>> Mark, I think you are over-generalizing here.  You have observed with
>> some number of flash drives --- maybe only one, but I don't know that
>> for sure --- that TRIM is slow.  Even if we grant that you are correct
>> in your conclusion that it is because the drive is doing slow flash
>> erase cycles (and I don't completely accept that; I haven't seen your
>> your measurements since we know that any kind of command that requires
>> a queue drain/flush before it can execute is going to be slow, and I
>> don't know what kind of _slow_ you are observing).
>
> I do this stuff on modest hardware:  ata_piix.
> There is NO QUEUE TO FLUSH.
>
> So one might expect TRIM to operate at the same speed as ordinary WRITEs.
> But it doesn't.  When I measured this in detail (and things have not changed
> much since then), we were talking 10s of milliseconds to 100s of milliseconds
> per TRIM command.
>
> The only possible explanation for that would be waiting on flash erase commands.

If you guys want to test how long trims take, Lukas wrote a test program
that does this.  It can be found here:
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/test-discard/

It will even spit out nice graphs that show you b/w, average trim
duration, maximum duration, etc.

Some devices are better than others.  We've definitely seen trims take a
lot of time compared to regular I/O.  However, using the batched discard
ioctl in a cron job, I don't think we have to worry about this
particular problem.  And I don't buy the argument that users want to do
this by hand.  Most users want things to Just Work(TM).

Cheers,
Jeff
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