Hi Nikanth, On 05/19/2010 08:46 PM +0900, Nikanth Karthikesan wrote: > Hi > > I have couple of questions regd request based dm. > > 1. With request based multipath, we have 2 elevators in the path to the > device. Doesn't 2 idling I/O schedulers affect performance? Is it better to > use the noop elevator for the dm device? What is suggested? > I can send a patch to set noop as default for rq based dm, if it would be > better. Vivek answered perfectly. > 2. The blk-layer limit nr_requests is the maximum nr of requests per-queue. > Currently we set it to the default maximum(128) and leave it. > > Instead would it be better to set it to a higher number based on the number of > paths(underlying devices) and their nr_requests? In bio-based dm-multipath, we > were queueing upto the sum of all the underlying queue's nr_requests. > > For example the attached patch would set it to the sum of nr_requests of all > the targets. May be it is better to do it from the user-space daemon, > multipathd? Or just 128 requests is enough as in the end, it is going to be a > single LUN? Or should we simply use the nr_request from one of the underlying > device? Or the maximum nr_request amoung the underlying devices? Thank you for working on this! This has been on my TODO list for a long time and I have been having the same concern. My personal opinion is: o q->nr_requests of underlying devices may not be of our interests, since we don't use 'request' of underlying device's queue. o Instead, we might have to consider queue_depth of bottom devices, since queue_depth should affect I/O performance. Propagating the sum of underlying device's queue_depth to upper device using I/O topology framework or something may be an candidate for that. o On the other hand, which underlying devices are used depends on multipath configuration. (e.g. For multibus, the sum of all underlying devices' queue_depth should be appropriate. But for failover, one of the underlying devices' queue_depth may be enough.) o Considering above, the userspace daemon, which knows multipath configuration in use, may be a good place to implement that. (Although some help/interface in kernel should be needed.) Thanks, Kiyoshi Ueda -- dm-devel mailing list dm-devel@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel