> Il giorno 23 mag 2019, alle ore 04:30, Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto: > > On 5/22/19 3:54 AM, Paolo Valente wrote: >> >> >>> Il giorno 22 mag 2019, alle ore 12:01, Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto: >>> >>> On 5/22/19 2:09 AM, Paolo Valente wrote: >>>> >>>> First, thank you very much for testing my patches, and, above all, for >>>> sharing those huge traces! >>>> >>>> According to the your traces, the residual 20% lower throughput that you >>>> record is due to the fact that the BFQ injection mechanism takes a few >>>> hundredths of seconds to stabilize, at the beginning of the workload. >>>> During that setup time, the throughput is equal to the dreadful ~60-90 KB/s >>>> that you see without this new patch. After that time, there >>>> seems to be no loss according to the trace. >>>> >>>> The problem is that a loss lasting only a few hundredths of seconds is >>>> however not negligible for a write workload that lasts only 3-4 >>>> seconds. Could you please try writing a larger file? >>>> >>> >>> I tried running dd for longer (about 100 seconds), but still saw around >>> 1.4 MB/s throughput with BFQ, and between 1.5 MB/s - 1.6 MB/s with >>> mq-deadline and noop. >> >> Ok, then now the cause is the periodic reset of the mechanism. >> >> It would be super easy to fill this gap, by just gearing the mechanism >> toward a very aggressive injection. The problem is maintaining >> control. As you can imagine from the performance gap between CFQ (or >> BFQ with malfunctioning injection) and BFQ with this fix, it is very >> hard to succeed in maximizing the throughput while at the same time >> preserving control on per-group I/O. >> > > Ah, I see. Just to make sure that this fix doesn't overly optimize for > total throughput (because of the testcase we've been using) and end up > causing regressions in per-group I/O control, I ran a test with > multiple simultaneous dd instances, each writing to a different > portion of the filesystem (well separated, to induce seeks), and each > dd task bound to its own blkio cgroup. I saw similar results with and > without this patch, and the throughput was equally distributed among > all the dd tasks. > Thank you very much for pre-testing this change, this let me know in advance that I shouldn't find issues when I'll test regressions, at the end of this change phase. >> On the bright side, you might be interested in one of the benefits >> that BFQ gives in return for this ~10% loss of throughput, in a >> scenario that may be important for you (according to affiliation you >> report): from ~500% to ~1000% higher throughput when you have to serve >> the I/O of multiple VMs, and to guarantee at least no starvation to >> any VM [1]. The same holds with multiple clients or containers, and >> in general with any set of entities that may compete for storage. >> >> [1] https://www.linaro.org/blog/io-bandwidth-management-for-production-quality-services/ >> > > Great article! :) Thank you for sharing it! Thanks! I mentioned it just to better put things into context. > >>> But I'm not too worried about that difference. >>> >>>> In addition, I wanted to ask you whether you measured BFQ throughput >>>> with traces disabled. This may make a difference. >>>> >>> >>> The above result (1.4 MB/s) was obtained with traces disabled. >>> >>>> After trying writing a larger file, you can try with low_latency on. >>>> On my side, it causes results to become a little unstable across >>>> repetitions (which is expected). >>>> >>> With low_latency on, I get between 60 KB/s - 100 KB/s. >>> >> >> Gosh, full regression. Fortunately, it is simply meaningless to use >> low_latency in a scenario where the goal is to guarantee per-group >> bandwidths. Low-latency heuristics, to reach their (low-latency) >> goals, modify the I/O schedule compared to the best schedule for >> honoring group weights and boosting throughput. So, as recommended in >> BFQ documentation, just switch low_latency off if you want to control >> I/O with groups. It may still make sense to leave low_latency on >> in some specific case, which I don't want to bother you about. >> > > My main concern here is about Linux's I/O performance out-of-the-box, > i.e., with all default settings, which are: > > - cgroups and blkio enabled (systemd default) > - blkio non-root cgroups in use (this is the implicit systemd behavior > if docker is installed; i.e., it runs tasks under user.slice) > - I/O scheduler with blkio group sched support: bfq > - bfq default configuration: low_latency = 1 > > If this yields a throughput that is 10x-30x slower than what is > achievable, I think we should either fix the code (if possible) or > change the defaults such that they don't lead to this performance > collapse (perhaps default low_latency to 0 if bfq group scheduling > is in use?) Yeah, I thought of this after sending my last email yesterday. Group scheduling and low-latency heuristics may simply happen to fight against each other in personal systems. Let's proceed this way. I'll try first to make the BFQ low-latency mechanism clever enough to not hinder throughput when groups are in place. If I make it, then we will get the best of the two worlds: group isolation and intra-group low latency; with no configuration change needed. If I don't make it, I'll try to think of the best solution to cope with this non-trivial situation. >> However, I feel bad with such a low throughput :) Would you be so >> kind to provide me with a trace? >> > Certainly! Short runs of dd resulted in a lot of variation in the > throughput (between 60 KB/s - 1 MB/s), so I increased dd's runtime > to get repeatable numbers (~70 KB/s). As a result, the trace file > (trace-bfq-boost-injection-low-latency-71KBps) is quite large, and > is available here: > > https://www.dropbox.com/s/svqfbv0idcg17pn/bfq-traces.tar.gz?dl=0 > Thank you very much for your patience and professional help. > Also, I'm very happy to run additional tests or experiments to help > track down this issue. So, please don't hesitate to let me know if > you'd like me to try anything else or get you additional traces etc. :) > Here's to you! :) I've attached a new small improvement that may reduce fluctuations (path to apply on top of the others, of course). Unfortunately, I don't expect this change to boost the throughput though. In contrast, I've thought of a solution that might be rather effective: making BFQ aware (heuristically) of trivial synchronizations between processes in different groups. This will require a little more work and time. Thanks, Paolo
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> Thank you! > > Regards, > Srivatsa > VMware Photon OS
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