Re: Poor performance for 512b aligned "partial" writes from Windows guests in OpenStack + potential fix

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Hmmm, so if I have (wd) drives that list this in smartctl output, I 
should try and reformat them to 4k, which will give me better 
performance?

Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical

Do you have a link to this download? Can only find some .cz site with 
the rpms. 


-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Verges [mailto:martin.verges@xxxxxxxx] 
Sent: vrijdag 10 mei 2019 10:21
To: Trent Lloyd
Cc: ceph-users
Subject: Re:  Poor performance for 512b aligned "partial" 
writes from Windows guests in OpenStack + potential fix

Hello Trent,

many thanks for the insights. We always suggest to use 4kN over 512e 
HDDs to our users.

As we recently found out, is that WD Support offers a tool called HUGO 
to reformat 512e to 4kN drives with "hugo format -m <model_number> -n 
max --fastformat -b 4096" in seconds.
Maybe that helps someone that has bought the wrong disk.

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Am Fr., 10. Mai 2019 um 10:00 Uhr schrieb Trent Lloyd 
<trent.lloyd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:


	I recently was investigating a performance problem for a reasonably 
sized OpenStack deployment having around 220 OSDs (3.5" 7200 RPM SAS 
HDD) with NVMe Journals. The primary workload is Windows guests backed 
by Cinder RBD volumes.
	This specific deployment is Ceph Jewel (FileStore + 
SimpleMessenger) which while it is EOL, the issue is reproducible on 
current versions and also on BlueStore however for different reasons 
than FileStore.
	

	Generally the Ceph cluster was suffering from very poor outlier 
performance, the numbers change a little bit depending on the exact 
situation but roughly 80% of I/O was happening in a "reasonable" time of 
0-200ms but 5-20% of I/O operations were taking excessively long 
anywhere from 500ms through to 10-20+ seconds. However the normal 
metrics for commit and apply latency were normal, and in fact, this 
latency was hard to spot in the performance metrics available in jewel.

	Previously I more simply considered FileStore to have the "commit" 
(to journal) stage where it was written to the journal and it is OK to 
return to the client and then the "apply" (to disk) stage where it was 
flushed to disk and confirmed so that the data could be purged from the 
journal. However there is really a third stage in the middle where 
FileStore submits the I/O to the operating system and this is done 
before the lock on the object is released. Until that succeeds another 
operation cannot write to the same object (generally being a 4MB area of 
the disk).

	I found that the fstore_op threads would get stuck for hundreds of 
MS or more inside of pwritev() which was blocking inside of the kernel. 
Normally we expect pwritev() to be buffered I/O into the page cache and 
return quite fast however in this case the kernel was in a few percent 
of cases blocking with the stack trace included at the end of the e-mail 
[1]. My finding from that stack is that inside __block_write_begin_int 
we see a call to out_of_line_wait_on_bit call which is really an inlined 
call for wait_on_buffer which occurs in linux/fs/buffer.c in the section 
around line 2000-2024 with the comment "If we issued read requests - let 
them complete." 
(https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/a2d635decbfa9c1e4ae15cb05b68b255
9f7f827c/fs/buffer.c#L2002)

	My interpretation of that code is that for Linux to store a write 
in the page cache, it has to have the entire 4K page as that is the 
granularity of which it tracks the dirty state and it needs the entire 
4K page to later submit back to the disk. Since we wrote a part of the 
page, and the page wasn't already in the cache, it has to fetch the 
remainder of the page from the disk. When this happens, it blocks 
waiting for this read to complete before returning from the pwritev() 
call - hence our normally buffered write blocks. This holds up the 
tp_fstore_op thread, of which there are (by default) only 2-4 such 
threads trying to process several hundred operations per second. 
Additionally the size of the osd_op_queue is bounded, and operations do 
not clear out of this queue until the tp_fstore_op thread is done. Which 
ultimately means that not only are these partial writes delayed but it 
knocks on to delay other writes behind them because of the constrained 
thread pools.

	What was further confusing to this, is that I could easily 
reproduce this in a test deployment using an rbd benchmark that was only 
writing to a total disk size of 256MB which I would easily have expected 
to fit in the page cache:
	
	rbd create -p rbd --size=256M bench2
	rbd bench-write -p rbd bench2 --io-size 512 --io-threads 256 
--io-total 256M --io-pattern rand

	This is explained by the fact that on secondary OSDs (at least, 
there was some refactoring of fadvise which I have not fully understood 
as of yet), FileStore is using fadvise FADVISE_DONTNEED on the objects 
after write which causes the kernel to immediately discard them from the 
page cache without any regard to their statistics of being 
recently/frequently used. The motivation for this addition appears to be 
that on a secondary OSD we don't service reads (only writes) and so 
therefor we can optimize memory usage by throwing away this object and 
in theory leaving more room in the page cache for objects which we are 
primary for and expect to actually service reads from a client for. 
Unfortunately this behavior does not take into account partial writes, 
where we now pathologically throw away the cached copy instantly such 
that a write even 1 second later will have to fetch the page from disk 
again. I also found that this FADVISE_DONTNEED is issue not only during 
filestore sync but also by the WBThrottle - which as this cluster was 
quite busy was constantly flushing writes leading to the cache being 
discarded almost instantly.

	Changing filestore_fadvise to False on this cluster lead to a 
significant performance increase as it could now cache the pages in 
memory in many cases. The number of reads from disk was reduced from 
around 40/second to 2/second, and the number of slow writes (>200ms) 
operations was reduced by 75%.

	I wrote a script to parse ceph-osd logs with debug_filestore=10 or 
15 to report the time spent inside of write() as well as to count and 
report on the number of operations that are unaligned and also slow. 
It's a bit rough but you can find it here: 
https://github.com/lathiat/ceph-tools/blob/master/fstore_op_latency.rb 

	It does not solve the problem entirely, in that a filestore thread 
can still be blocked in such a case where it is not cached - but the 
pathological case of never having it in the cache is removed at least. 
Understanding this problem, I looked to the situation for BlueStore. 
BlueStore suffers from a similar issue in that the performance is quite 
poor due to both fadvise and also because it is check-summing the data 
in 4k blocks so needs to read the rest of the block in, despite not 
having the limitations of the Linux page cache to deal with. I have not 
yet further fully investigated BlueStore implementation other than to 
note the following doc talking about how such writes are handled and a 
possible future improvement to submit partial writes into the WAL before 
reading the rest of the block, which is apparently not done currently 
(and would be a great optimization): 
http://docs.ceph.com/docs/mimic/dev/bluestore/
	


	Moving onto a full solution for this issue. We can tell Windows 
guests to send 4k-aligned I/O where possible by setting the 
physical_block_size hint on the disk. This support was added mainly for 
the incoming new series of hard drives which also have 4k blocks 
internally, and also need to do a similar 'read-modify-update' operation 
in the case where a smaller write is done. In this case Windows tries to 
align the I/O to 4k as much as possible, at the most basic level for 
example when a new file is created, it will pad out the write to the 
block to the nearest 4k. You can read more about support for that here:
	https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/2510009/microsoft-support-
policy-for-4k-sector-hard-drives-in-windows

	On a basic test, booting a Windows 2016 instance and then 
installing several months of Windows Updates the number of partial 
writes was reduced from 23% (753090 / 3229597) to 1.8% (54535 / 2880217) 
- many of which were during early boot and don't re-occur once the VM is 
running.

	I have submitted a patch to the OpenStack Cinder RBD driver to 
support setting this parameter. You can find that here:
	https://review.opendev.org/#/c/658283/
	

	I did not have much luck finding information about any of this 
online when I searched, so this e-mail is serving largely to document my 
findings for others. But I am also looking for input from anyone as to 
anything I have missed, confirming my analysis as sound, review for my 
Cinder patch, etc.

	There is also likely scope to make this same patch to report a 
physical_block_size=4096 on other Ceph consumers such as the new(ish) 
iSCSI gateway, etc.

	Regards,
	Trent


	[1] fstore_op pwritev blocking stack trace - if anyone is 
interested in the perf data, flamegraph, etc - I'd be happy to share.

	tp_fstore_op 
	
	ceph::buffer::list::write_fd 
	pwritev64 
	entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe 
	do_syscall_64 
	sys_pwritev 
	do_pwritev 
	vfs_writev 
	do_iter_write 
	do_iter_readv_writev 
	xfs_file_write_iter 
	xfs_file_buffered_aio_write 
	iomap_file_buffered_write 
	iomap_apply 
	iomap_write_actor 
	iomap_write_begin.constprop.18 
	__block_write_begin_int 
	out_of_line_wait_on_bit 
	__wait_on_bit 
	bit_wait_io 
	io_schedule 
	schedule 
	__schedule 
	finish_task_switch 
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