Message-ID: <20120425031635.GA6895@localhost>
Date:	Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:16:35 +0800
From:	Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@...el.com>
To:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
Cc:	Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com>, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
	Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	sjayaraman@...e.com, andrea@...terlinux.com, jmoyer@...hat.com,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	kamezawa.hiroyu@...fujitsu.com, lizefan@...wei.com,
	containers@...ts.linux-foundation.org, cgroups@...r.kernel.org,
	ctalbott@...gle.com, rni@...gle.com, lsf@...ts.linux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: [RFC] writeback and cgroup

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 04:56:55PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Tue 24-04-12 19:33:40, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:57:45AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > > On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 10:36:39PM +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> > > 
> > > [..]
> > > > Yeah the backpressure idea would work nicely with all possible
> > > > intermediate stacking between the bdi and leaf devices. In my attempt
> > > > to do combined IO bandwidth control for
> > > > 
> > > > - buffered writes, in balance_dirty_pages()
> > > > - direct IO, in the cfq IO scheduler
> > > > 
> > > > I have to look into the cfq code in the past days to get an idea how
> > > > the two throttling layers can cooperate (and suffer from the pains
> > > > arise from the violations of layers). It's also rather tricky to get
> > > > two previously independent throttling mechanisms to work seamlessly
> > > > with each other for providing the desired _unified_ user interface. It
> > > > took a lot of reasoning and experiments to work the basic scheme out...
> > > > 
> > > > But here is the first result. The attached graph shows progress of 4
> > > > tasks:
> > > > - cgroup A: 1 direct dd + 1 buffered dd
> > > > - cgroup B: 1 direct dd + 1 buffered dd
> > > > 
> > > > The 4 tasks are mostly progressing at the same pace. The top 2
> > > > smoother lines are for the buffered dirtiers. The bottom 2 lines are
> > > > for the direct writers. As you may notice, the two direct writers are
> > > > somehow stalled for 1-2 times, which increases the gaps between the
> > > > lines. Otherwise, the algorithm is working as expected to distribute
> > > > the bandwidth to each task.
> > > > 
> > > > The current code's target is to satisfy the more realistic user demand
> > > > of distributing bandwidth equally to each cgroup, and inside each
> > > > cgroup, distribute bandwidth equally to buffered/direct writes. On top
> > > > of which, weights can be specified to change the default distribution.
> > > > 
> > > > The implementation involves adding "weight for direct IO" to the cfq
> > > > groups and "weight for buffered writes" to the root cgroup. Note that
> > > > current cfq proportional IO conroller does not offer explicit control
> > > > over the direct:buffered ratio.
> > > > 
> > > > When there are both direct/buffered writers in the cgroup,
> > > > balance_dirty_pages() will kick in and adjust the weights for cfq to
> > > > execute. Note that cfq will continue to send all flusher IOs to the
> > > > root cgroup.  balance_dirty_pages() will compute the overall async
> > > > weight for it so that in the above test case, the computed weights
> > > > will be
> > > 
> > > I think having separate weigths for sync IO groups and async IO is not
> > > very appealing. There should be one notion of group weight and bandwidth
> > > distrubuted among groups according to their weight.
> > 
> > There have to be some scheme, either explicitly or implicitly. Maybe
> > you are baring in mind some "equal split among queues" policy? For
> > example, if the cgroup has 9 active sync queues and 1 async queue,
> > split the weight equally to the 10 queues?  So the sync IOs get 90%
> > share, and the async writes get 10% share.
>   Maybe I misunderstand but there doesn't have to be (and in fact isn't)
> any split among sync / async IO in CFQ. At each moment, we choose a queue
> with the highest score and dispatch a couple of requests from it. Then we
> go and choose again. The score of the queue depends on several factors
> (like age of requests, whether the queue is sync or async, IO priority,
> etc.).
> 
> Practically, over a longer period system will stabilize on some ratio
> but that's dependent on the load so your system should not impose some
> artificial direct/buffered split but rather somehow deal with the reality
> how IO scheduler decides to dispatch requests...

>   Well, but we also have IO priorities which change which queue should get
> preference.

>   And also sync queues for several processes can get merged when CFQ
> observes these processes cooperate together on one area of disk and get
> split again when processes stop cooperating. I don't think you really want
> to second-guess what CFQ does inside...
 
Good points, thank you!

So the cfq behavior is pretty undetermined. I more or less realize
this from the experiments. For example, when starting 2+ "dd oflag=direct"
tasks in one single cgroup, they _sometimes_ progress at different rates.
See the attached graphs for two such examples on XFS. ext4 is fine.

The 2-dd test case is:

mkdir /cgroup/dd
echo $$ > /cgroup/dd/tasks

dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero1 bs=1M oflag=direct &
dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero2 bs=1M oflag=direct &

The 6-dd test case is similar.

> > Look at this graph, the 4 dd tasks are granted the same weight (2 of
> > them are buffered writes). I guess the 2 buffered dd tasks managed to
> > progress much faster than the 2 direct dd tasks just because the async
> > IOs are much more efficient than the bs=64k direct IOs.
>   Likely because 64k is too low to get good bandwidth with direct IO. If
> it was 4M, I believe you would get similar throughput for buffered and
> direct IO. So essentially you are right, small IO benefits from caching
> effects since they allow you to submit larger requests to the device which
> is more efficient.

I didn't direct compare the effects, however here is an example of
doing 1M, 64k, 4k direct writes in parallel. It _seems_ bs=1M only has
marginal benefits of 64k, assuming cfq is behaving well.

https://github.com/fengguang/io-controller-tests/raw/master/log/snb/ext4/direct-write-1M-64k-4k.2012-04-19-10-50/balance_dirty_pages-task-bw.png

The test case is:

# cgroup 1
echo 500 > /cgroup/cp/blkio.weight

dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero-1M bs=1M oflag=direct &

# cgroup 2
echo 1000 > /cgroup/dd/blkio.weight

dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero-64k bs=64k oflag=direct &
dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero-4k  bs=4k  oflag=direct &

Thanks,
Fengguang

Download attachment "balance_dirty_pages-task-bw.png" of type "image/png" (55134 bytes)

Download attachment "balance_dirty_pages-task-bw.png" of type "image/png" (61243 bytes)

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