Date:	Tue, 11 Aug 2015 11:32:27 -0600
From:	Jens Axboe <axboe@...com>
To:	Rafal Mielniczuk <rafal.mielniczuk@...rix.com>,
	Bob Liu <bob.liu@...cle.com>
CC:	Marcus Granado <Marcus.Granado@...rix.com>,
	Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@...il.com>,
	Felipe Franciosi <felipe.franciosi@...rix.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	David Vrabel <david.vrabel@...rix.com>,
	"xen-devel@...ts.xenproject.org" <xen-devel@...ts.xenproject.org>,
	"boris.ostrovsky@...cle.com" <boris.ostrovsky@...cle.com>,
	Jonathan Davies <Jonathan.Davies@...rix.com>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC v2 0/5] Multi-queue support for xen-blkfront
 and xen-blkback

On 08/11/2015 03:45 AM, Rafal Mielniczuk wrote:
> On 11/08/15 07:08, Bob Liu wrote:
>> On 08/10/2015 11:52 PM, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>> On 08/10/2015 05:03 AM, Rafal Mielniczuk wrote:
>>>> On 01/07/15 04:03, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>>> On 06/30/2015 08:21 AM, Marcus Granado wrote:
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Our measurements for the multiqueue patch indicate a clear improvement
>>>>>> in iops when more queues are used.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The measurements were obtained under the following conditions:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> - using blkback as the dom0 backend with the multiqueue patch applied to
>>>>>> a dom0 kernel 4.0 on 8 vcpus.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> - using a recent Ubuntu 15.04 kernel 3.19 with multiqueue frontend
>>>>>> applied to be used as a guest on 4 vcpus
>>>>>>
>>>>>> - using a micron RealSSD P320h as the underlying local storage on a Dell
>>>>>> PowerEdge R720 with 2 Xeon E5-2643 v2 cpus.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> - fio 2.2.7-22-g36870 as the generator of synthetic loads in the guest.
>>>>>> We used direct_io to skip caching in the guest and ran fio for 60s
>>>>>> reading a number of block sizes ranging from 512 bytes to 4MiB. Queue
>>>>>> depth of 32 for each queue was used to saturate individual vcpus in the
>>>>>> guest.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We were interested in observing storage iops for different values of
>>>>>> block sizes. Our expectation was that iops would improve when increasing
>>>>>> the number of queues, because both the guest and dom0 would be able to
>>>>>> make use of more vcpus to handle these requests.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> These are the results (as aggregate iops for all the fio threads) that
>>>>>> we got for the conditions above with sequential reads:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> fio_threads  io_depth  block_size   1-queue_iops  8-queue_iops
>>>>>>        8           32       512           158K         264K
>>>>>>        8           32        1K           157K         260K
>>>>>>        8           32        2K           157K         258K
>>>>>>        8           32        4K           148K         257K
>>>>>>        8           32        8K           124K         207K
>>>>>>        8           32       16K            84K         105K
>>>>>>        8           32       32K            50K          54K
>>>>>>        8           32       64K            24K          27K
>>>>>>        8           32      128K            11K          13K
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 8-queue iops was better than single queue iops for all the block sizes.
>>>>>> There were very good improvements as well for sequential writes with
>>>>>> block size 4K (from 80K iops with single queue to 230K iops with 8
>>>>>> queues), and no regressions were visible in any measurement performed.
>>>>> Great results! And I don't know why this code has lingered for so long,
>>>>> so thanks for helping get some attention to this again.
>>>>>
>>>>> Personally I'd be really interested in the results for the same set of
>>>>> tests, but without the blk-mq patches. Do you have them, or could you
>>>>> potentially run them?
>>>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> We rerun the tests for sequential reads with the identical settings but with Bob Liu's multiqueue patches reverted from dom0 and guest kernels.
>>>> The results we obtained were *better* than the results we got with multiqueue patches applied:
>>>>
>>>> fio_threads  io_depth  block_size   1-queue_iops  8-queue_iops  *no-mq-patches_iops*
>>>>        8           32       512           158K         264K         321K
>>>>        8           32        1K           157K         260K         328K
>>>>        8           32        2K           157K         258K         336K
>>>>        8           32        4K           148K         257K         308K
>>>>        8           32        8K           124K         207K         188K
>>>>        8           32       16K            84K         105K         82K
>>>>        8           32       32K            50K          54K         36K
>>>>        8           32       64K            24K          27K         16K
>>>>        8           32      128K            11K          13K         11K
>>>>
>>>> We noticed that the requests are not merged by the guest when the multiqueue patches are applied,
>>>> which results in a regression for small block sizes (RealSSD P320h's optimal block size is around 32-64KB).
>>>>
>>>> We observed similar regression for the Dell MZ-5EA1000-0D3 100 GB 2.5" Internal SSD
>>>>
>>>> As I understand blk-mq layer bypasses I/O scheduler which also effectively disables merges.
>>>> Could you explain why it is difficult to enable merging in the blk-mq layer?
>>>> That could help closing the performance gap we observed.
>>>>
>>>> Otherwise, the tests shows that the multiqueue patches does not improve the performance,
>>>> at least when it comes to sequential read/writes operations.
>>> blk-mq still provides merging, there should be no difference there. Does the xen patches set BLK_MQ_F_SHOULD_MERGE?
>>>
>> Yes.
>> Is it possible that xen-blkfront driver dequeue requests too fast after we have multiple hardware queues?
>> Because new requests don't have the chance merging with old requests which were already dequeued and issued.
>>
>
> For some reason we don't see merges even when we set multiqueue to 1.
> Below are some stats from the guest system when doing sequential 4KB reads:
>
> $ fio --name=test --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --rw=read --numjobs=8
>        --iodepth=32 --time_based=1 --runtime=300 --bs=4KB
> --filename=/dev/xvdb
>
> $ iostat -xt 5 /dev/xvdb
> avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
>             0.50    0.00    2.73   85.14    2.00    9.63
>
> Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s       r/s     w/s     rkB/s    wkB/s
> avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
> xvdb              0.00     0.00 156926.00    0.00 627704.00     0.00
> 8.00    30.06    0.19    0.19    0.00   0.01 100.48
>
> $ cat /sys/block/xvdb/queue/scheduler
> none
>
> $ cat /sys/block/xvdb/queue/nomerges
> 0
>
> Relevant bits from the xenstore configuration on the dom0:
>
> /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/2/51728/dev = "xvdb"
> /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/2/51728/backend-kind = "vbd"
> /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/2/51728/type = "phy"
> /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/2/51728/multi-queue-max-queues = "1"
>
> /local/domain/2/device/vbd/51728/multi-queue-num-queues = "1"
> /local/domain/2/device/vbd/51728/ring-ref = "9"
> /local/domain/2/device/vbd/51728/event-channel = "60"

If you add --iodepth-batch=16 to that fio command line? Both mq and 
non-mq relies on plugging to get batching in the use case above, 
otherwise IO is dispatched immediately. O_DIRECT is immediate. I'd be 
more interested in seeing a test case with buffered IO of a file system 
on top of the xvdb device, if we're missing merging for that case, then 
that's a much bigger issue.

-- 
Jens Axboe

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