>To make the reasoning more obvious: > >Assume we just submitted readahead IO request for pages N ~ N+M, then > T(N) <= T(N+1) > T(N) <= T(N+2) > T(N) <= T(N+3) > ... > T(N) <= T(N+M) (M = readahead size) >So if the reader is going to block on any page in the above chunk, >it is going to first block on page N. > >With RAID (and NFS to some degree), there is no strict ordering, >so the reader is more likely to block on some random pages. > >In the first case, the effective async_size = M, in the second case, >the effective async_size <= M. The more async_size, the more degree of >readahead pipeline, hence the more low level IO latencies are hidden >to the application. > >Thanks, >Fengguang > >> >> > >> > if (PageReadahead(page)) >> > page_cache_async_readahead() >> > if (!PageUptodate(page)) >> > goto page_not_up_to_date; >> > //... >> > page_not_up_to_date: >> > lock_page_killable(page); >> > >> > >> > Therefore explicit unplugging can help, so >> > >> > Acked-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx> >> > >> > The only question is, shall we avoid the double unplug by doing this? >> > Hi Andrew. Please merge following patch. Thanks. --- I added blk_run_backing_dev on page_cache_async_readahead so readahead I/O is unpluged to improve throughput on especially RAID environment. Following is the test result with dd. #dd if=testdir/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16384 -2.6.30-rc6 1048576+0 records in 1048576+0 records out 17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 224.182 seconds, 76.6 MB/s -2.6.30-rc6-patched 1048576+0 records in 1048576+0 records out 17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 206.465 seconds, 83.2 MB/s My testing environment is as follows: Hardware: HP DL580 CPU:Xeon 3.2GHz *4 HT enabled Memory:8GB Storage: Dothill SANNet2 FC (7Disks RAID-0 Array) The normal case is, if page N become uptodate at time T(N), then T(N) <= T(N+1) holds. With RAID (and NFS to some degree), there is no strict ordering, the data arrival time depends on runtime status of individual disks, which breaks that formula. So in do_generic_file_read(), just after submitting the async readahead IO request, the current page may well be uptodate, so the page won't be locked, and the block device won't be implicitly unplugged: if (PageReadahead(page)) page_cache_async_readahead() if (!PageUptodate(page)) goto page_not_up_to_date; //... page_not_up_to_date: lock_page_killable(page); Therefore explicit unplugging can help. Signed-off-by: Hisashi Hifumi <hifumi.hisashi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx> mm/readahead.c | 10 ++++++++++ 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+) --- linux.orig/mm/readahead.c +++ linux/mm/readahead.c @@ -490,5 +490,15 @@ page_cache_async_readahead(struct addres /* do read-ahead */ ondemand_readahead(mapping, ra, filp, true, offset, req_size); + + /* + * Normally the current page is !uptodate and lock_page() will be + * immediately called to implicitly unplug the device. However this + * is not always true for RAID conifgurations, where data arrives + * not strictly in their submission order. In this case we need to + * explicitly kick off the IO. + */ + if (PageUptodate(page)) + blk_run_backing_dev(mapping->backing_dev_info, NULL); } EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(page_cache_async_readahead); -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html