Re: RFE: Graphing and iteration support for fio

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 





On 12/03/2015 07:01 PM, Jens Axboe wrote:
On 12/01/2015 04:04 AM, Avi Kivity wrote:
Sometimes you want to run a set of experiments on a disk, varying a
parameter between tests (in my case, iodepth, but buffer size is also a
good candidate).  You then want to present the results in a nice graph.

I wrote a small wrapper around fio to do this
(https://github.com/avikivity/diskplorer), but it occurs to me that
generalized support for both in fio would be much more useful.

Possibly, you'd define a job as a template:

[aio-read]
template_start=1
template_end=100
template_step=1
(or template_ratio=1.05 for exponential growth)
iodepth=template_variable

(it's just possible that someone can come up with better syntax).

A few more options in the global section can then cause a graph to be
generated.

It'd be great to integrate this into fio, as graphing results is something that most people want to do. Any chance you would be willing to try and hash that out?

I'd love to say yes, but no.


btw, a fast disk can easily saturate a single core using libaio, so a
multithreaded libaio ioengine would be welcome (I am currently emulating
it using multiple jobs and new_group).

In the context of fio, that doesn't make a lot of sense. A job in fio is, by definition, either a thread or a process that does IO. So if you want more threads banging on a device, then you'd add more jobs. If multiple threads shared on aio context, then we'd also potentially see contention on that part. If you just use more jobs, then each gets an aio context as well.


If your jobs are generated via a template, as above, then this is hard to do. For iodepth=1 you want one job with iodepth=1. For iodepth=64 you want 8 jobs (one per core) each with an iodepth=8; otherwise a fast SSD will overwhelm a single core.

Perhaps the job specification can be modified so that it auto-generates subjobs. In the specification, there is one entry, but fio sees 8 (or 1, when the template sets iodepth=1), and reports them via a group.

[aio-read]
template_start=1
template_end=100
template_step=1
(or template_ratio=1.05 for exponential growth)
subjobs=(min(template_variable, core_count))
iodepth=(template_variable / subjobs)

(the above doesn't cope will with an iodepth that doesn't divide into your core_count; displorer will generate subjobs with different iodepth for this)


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe fio" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html



[Index of Archives]     [Linux Kernel]     [Linux SCSI]     [Linux IDE]     [Linux USB Devel]     [Video for Linux]     [Linux Audio Users]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCSI]

  Powered by Linux