Date:	Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:06:41 +0200
From:	Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@...il.com>
To:	Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman@...il.com>
Cc:	Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@...cle.com>, Matthew <jackdachef@...il.com>,
	Kasper Sandberg <lkml@...anurb.dk>,
	Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: performance "regression" in cfq compared to anticipatory, deadline and noop

> From: Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman@...il.com>
> Date: Mon, Aug 25, 2008 04:39:01PM +0100
>
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 9:29 PM, Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@...il.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >> From: Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman@...il.com>
> >> Date: Sun, Aug 24, 2008 09:24:37PM +0100
> >>
> >> Hi Fabio, Jens,
> >>
> > ...
> >> This was the last test I didn't get around to. Alas, is did help, but
> >> didn't give the merging required for full performance:
> >>
> >> # echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null
> >> bs=128k count=2000
> >> 262144000 bytes (262 MB) copied, 2.47787 s, 106 MB/s
> >>
> >> # echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; hdparm -t /dev/sda
> >> Timing buffered disk reads:  308 MB in  3.01 seconds = 102.46 MB/sec
> >>
> >> It is an improvement over the baseline performance of 2.6.27-rc4:
> >>
> >> # echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null
> >> bs=128k count=2000
> >> 262144000 bytes (262 MB) copied, 2.56514 s, 102 MB/s
> >>
> >> # echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; hdparm -t /dev/sda
> >> Timing buffered disk reads:  294 MB in  3.02 seconds =  97.33 MB/sec
> >>
> >> Note that platter speed is around 125MB/s (which I get near at smaller
> >> read sizes).
> >>
> >> I feel 128KB read requests are perhaps important, as this is a
> >> commonly-used RAID stripe size, and may explain the read-performance
> >> drop sometimes we see in hardware vs software RAID benchmarks.
> >>
> >> How can we generate some ideas or movement on fixing/improving this behaviour?
> >>
> >
> > Thank you for testing.  The blktrace output for this run should be
> > interesting, esp. to compare it with a blktrace obtained from anticipatory
> > with the same workload - IIRC anticipatory didn't suffer from the problem,
> > and anticipatory has a slightly different dispatching mechanism that
> > this patch tried to bring into cfq.
> >
> > Even if a proper fix may not belong to the elevator itself, I think
> > that this couple (this last test + anticipatory) of traces should help
> > in better understanding what is still going wrong.
> >
> > Thank you in advance.
> 
> See http://quora.org/blktrace-n.tar.bz2
> 
> Where n is:
>  0 - 2.6.27-rc4 unpatched
>  1 - 2.6.27-rc4 with your CFQ patch, CFQ scheduler
>  2 - 2.6.27-rc4 with your CFQ patch, anticipatory scheduler
>  3 - 2.6.27-rc4 with your CFQ patch, deadline scheduler
> 
> I have found it's not always possible to reproduce this issue, eg now,
> with stock CFQ, I'm seeing consistent 117-123MB/s with hdparm and dd
> (as above), whereas I was seeing a consistent 95-103MB/s, so the
> blktraces may not show the slower-performance pattern - even with
> precisely the same (controlled) environment.
> 

If I read them correctly, all the traces show dispatches with
requests still growing; the elevator cannot know if a request
will grow or not once it has been queued, and the heuristics
we tried so far to postpone dispatches gave no results.

I don't see any elevator-only solution to the problem...
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