Date:	Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:35:15 +0200
From:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
To:	Jens Axboe <jaxboe@...ionio.com>
Cc:	Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"jmoyer@...hat.com" <jmoyer@...hat.com>,
	Lennart Poettering <lennart@...ttering.net>
Subject: Re: Request starvation with CFQ

On Tue 28-09-10 07:04:40, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 2010-09-28 05:02, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 09:00:24PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> >>   Hi,
> >>
> >>   when helping Lennart with answering some questions, I've spotted the
> >> following problem (at least I think it's a problem ;): The thing is that
> >> CFQ schedules how requests should be dispatched but does not in any
> >> significant way limit to whom requests get allocated. Given we have a
> >> quite limited pool of available requests it can happen that processes
> >> will be actually starved not waiting for disk but waiting for requests
> >> getting allocated and any IO scheduling priorities or classes will not
> >> have serious effect.
> >>   A pathological example I've tried below:
> >> #include <fcntl.h>
> >> #include <stdio.h>
> >> #include <stdlib.h>
> >> #include <sys/stat.h>
> >>
> >> int main(void)
> >> {
> >>   int fd = open("/dev/vdb", O_RDONLY);
> >>   int loop = 0;
> >>
> >>   if (fd < 0) {
> >>     perror("open");
> >>     exit(1);
> >>   }
> >>   while (1) {
> >>     if (loop % 100 == 0)
> >>       printf("Loop %d\n", loop);
> >>     posix_fadvise(fd, (random() * 4096) % 1000204886016ULL, 4096, POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED);
> >>     loop++;
> >>   }
> >> }
> >>
> >>   This program will just push as many requests as possible to the block
> >> layer and does not wait for any IO. Thus it will basically ignore any
> >> decisions about when requests get dispatched. BTW, don't get distracted
> >> by the fact that the program operates directly on the device, that is just
> >> for simplicity. Large enough file would work the same way.
> >>   Even though I run this program with ionice -c 3, I still see that any
> >> other IO to the device is basically stalled. When I look at the block
> >> traces, I indeed see that what happens is that the above program submits
> >> requests until there are no more available:
<snip>
> >>   I can provide the full traces for download if someone is interested
> >> in some part I didn't include here. The kernel is 2.6.36-rc4.
> >>   Now I agree that the above program is about as bad as it can get but
> >> Lennart would like to implement readahead during boot on background and
> >> I believe that could starve other IO in a similar way. So any idea how
> >> to solve this? To me it seems as if we also needed to somehow limit the
> >> number of allocated requests per cfqq but OTOH we have to be really careful
> >> to not harm common workloads where we benefit from having lots of requests
> >> queued...
> > 
> > Hi Jan,
> > 
> > True that during request allocation, there is no consideration for ioprio.
> > I think the whole logic is round robin, where after getting a bunch of
> > request each process is put to sleep in the queue and then we do round
> > robin on all waiters. This should in general be an issue with request
> > queue and not just CFQ.
> > 
> > So if there are bunch of threads which are very bullish on doing IO, and 
> > there is a dependent reader, read latencies will shoot up.
> > 
> > In fact current implementation of blkio controller also suffers with this
> > limitation because we don't yet have per group request descriptors and
> > once request queue is congested, requests from one group can get stuck
> > behind the requests from other group.
> > 
> > One way forward could be to implement per cgroup request descriptors and
> > put this readahead thread into a separate cgroup of low weight.
> > 
> > Other could be to implemnet some kind of request quota per priority level.
> > This is similar to per cgroup quota I talked above, just one level below.
> > 
> > Third could be ad-hoc way of putting some limit on per cfqq. But I think a
> > process can easily circumvent that by forking off child which are not
> > sharing cfq context and then we are back to same situaiton.
> > 
> > A very hackish solution could be to try to increase nr_requests on the 
> > queue to say 1024. This will work only if you know that read-ahead process
> > does some limited amount of read-ahead and does not overwhelm the queue
> > with more than 1024 requets.  And then use ioprio with low prio for
> > read-ahead process.
> 
> I don't think that is necessarily hackish. The current rq allocation
> batching and accounting is pretty horrible imho, in fact in recent
> patches I ripped that out. The vm copes a lot better with larger depths
> these days, so what I want to add is just a per-ioc queue limit instead.
  So no per-queue request limit? Since ioc is per-process if I'm right,
that would solve the problem quite nicely. Thanks for info.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR
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