On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:26:06PM -0400, Ted Ts'o wrote: > On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 09:27:57AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > > So you're assuming that locating the inodes somewhere "hot" is going > > to improve performance. So say an application has a "hot" file (say > > an index file) but still has a lot of other files it creates and > > reads, and they are all in the same directory. > > > > If the index file is created "hot", then it is going to be placed a > > long way away from all the other files that applciation is using, > > and every time you access the hot file you now seek away to a > > different location on disk. The net result: the application goes > > slower because average seek times have increased. > > Well, let's assume the application is using all or most of the disk, > so the objects it is fetching from the 2T disk are randomly > distributed throughout the disk. Which is so far from most people's reality that it is not worth considering. > Short seeks are faster, yes, but the > seek time as a function of the seek distance is decidedly non-linear, > with a sharp "knee" in the curve at around 10-15% of a full-stroke > seek. (Ref: > http://static.usenix.org/event/fast05/tech/schlosser/schlosser.pdf) > > So most of the time, as you seek back and forth fetching data objects, > most of the time you will be incurring 75-85% of the cost of a > worst-case seek anyway. So seeking *is* going to be a fact of life > that we can't run away from that. > > Given that, the question then is whether we are better off (a) putting > the index files in the exact middle of the disk, trying to minimize > seeks, (b) scattering the index files all over the disk randomly, or > (c) concentrating the index files near the beginning of the disk? > Given the non-linear seek times, it seems to suggest that (c) would > probably be the best case for this use case. I disagree - based on that paper, you're better off putting all the related application data in the same place, and hoping it all fits in that 10-15% minimal seek time region.... Besides, you missed my point - that it is trivial to come up with examples of what application writers think are their hot/cold/normal data whose optimal layout bears no resemblence to your proposed hot/cold/normal inode layout. That's the fundamental problem here, there is no obvious definition of HOT/COLD, and that the best implementation depends on how the application uses those flags combined with the characteristics of the underlying storage. IOws, however you optimise it for a single spindle, a large percentage of the time it is going to be detrimental to performance, not improve it.... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
