Date:   Thu, 5 May 2022 17:13:00 +0200
From:   Bernd Schubert <bschubert@....com>
To:     Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com>,
        Dharmendra Hans <dharamhans87@...il.com>
Cc:     Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu>, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
        fuse-devel <fuse-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 0/3] FUSE: Implement atomic lookup + open/create



On 5/5/22 14:54, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> On Thu, May 05, 2022 at 11:42:51AM +0530, Dharmendra Hans wrote:
>> Here are the numbers I took last time. These were taken on tmpfs to
>> actually see the effect of reduced calls. On local file systems it
>> might not be that much visible. But we have observed that on systems
>> where we have thousands of clients hammering the metadata servers, it
>> helps a lot (We did not take numbers yet as  we are required to change
>> a lot of our client code but would be doing it later on).
>>
>> Note that for a change in performance number due to the new version of
>> these patches, we have just refactored the code and functionality has
>> remained the same since then.
>>
>> here is the link to the performance numbers
>> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20220322121212.5087-1-dharamhans87@gmail.com/
> 
> There is a lot going in that table. Trying to understand it.
> 
> - Why care about No-Flush. I mean that's independent of these changes,
>    right?  I am assuming this means that upon file close do not send
>    a flush to fuse server. Not sure how bringing No-Flush into the
>    mix is helpful here.


It is a basically removing another call from kernel to user space. The 
calls there are, the lower is the resulting percentage for atomic-open.


> 
> - What is "Patched Libfuse"? I am assuming that these are changes
>    needed in libfuse to support atomic create + atomic open. Similarly
>    assuming "Patched FuseK" means patched kernel with your changes.

Yes, I did that to ensure there is no regression with the patches, when 
the other side is not patched.

> 
>    If this is correct, I would probably only be interested in
>    looking at "Patched Libfuse + Patched FuseK" numbers to figure out
>    what's the effect of your changes w.r.t vanilla kernel + libfuse.
>    Am I understanding it right?

Yes.

> 
> - I am wondering why do we measure "Sequential" and "Random" patterns.
>    These optimizations are primarily for file creation + file opening
>    and I/O pattern should not matter.

bonnie++ does this automatically and it just convenient to take the 
bonnie++ csv value and to paste them into a table.

In our HPC world mdtest is more common, but it has MPI as requirement - 
make it harder to run. Reproducing the values with bonnie++ should be 
rather easy for you.

Only issue with bonnie++ is that bonnie++ by default does not run 
multi-threaded and the old 3rd party perl scripts I had to let it run 
with multiple processes and to sum up the values don't work anymore with 
recent perl versions. I need to find some time to fix that.


> 
> - Also wondering why performance of Read/s improves. Assuming once
>    file has been opened, I think your optimizations get out of the
>    way (no create, no open) and we are just going through data path of
>    reading file data and no lookups happening. If that's the case, why
>    do Read/s numbers show an improvement.

That is now bonnie++ works. It creates the files, closes them (which 
causes the flush) and then re-opens for stat and read - atomic open 
comes into the picture here. Also read() is totally skipped when the 
files are empty - which is why one should use something like 1B files.

If you have another metadata benchmark - please let us know.

> 
> - Why do we measure "Patched Libfuse". It shows performance regression
>    of 4-5% in table 0B, Sequential workoad. That sounds bad. So without
>    any optimization kicking in, it has a performance cost.

Yes, I'm not sure yet. There is not so much code that has changed on the 
libfuse side.
However the table needs to be redone with fixed libfuse - limiting the 
number of threads caused a permanent libfuse thread creation and destruction

https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/pull/652

The numbers in table are also with paththrough_ll, which has its own 
issue due to linear inode search. paththrough_hp uses a C++ map and 
avoids that. I noticed too late when I started to investigate why there 
are regressions....

Also the table made me to investigate/profile all the fuse operations, 
which resulted in my waitq question. Please see that thread for more 
details 
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/9326bb76-680f-05f6-6f78-df6170afaa2c@fastmail.fm/T/

Regarding atomic-open/create with avoiding lookup/revalidate, our 
primary goal is to reduce network calls. A file system that handles it 
locally only reduces the number of fuse kernel/user space crossing. A 
network file system that fully supports it needs to do the atomic open 
(or in old terms lookup-intent-open) on the server side of the network 
and needs to transfer attributes together with the open result.

Lustre does this, although I cannot easily point you to the right code. 
It all started almost two decades ago:
https://groups.google.com/g/lucky.linux.fsdevel/c/iYNFIIrkJ1s


BeeGFS does this as well
https://git.beegfs.io/pub/v7/-/blob/master/client_module/source/filesystem/FhgfsOpsInode.c
See for examaple FhgfsOps_atomicOpen() and FhgfsOps_createIntent()

(FhGFS is the old name when I was still involved in the project.)

 From my head I'm not sure if NFS does it over the wire, maybe v4.


Thanks,
Bernd

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