On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 04:40:19PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote: > On Wed 31-07-13 14:15:40, Dave Chinner wrote: > > From: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx> > > > > Doing writeback on lots of little files causes terrible IOPS storms > > because of the per-mapping writeback plugging we do. This > > essentially causes imeediate dispatch of IO for each mapping, > > regardless of the context in which writeback is occurring. > > > > IOWs, running a concurrent write-lots-of-small 4k files using fsmark > > on XFS results in a huge number of IOPS being issued for data > > writes. Metadata writes are sorted and plugged at a high level by > > XFS, so aggregate nicely into large IOs. However, data writeback IOs > > are dispatched in individual 4k IOs, even when the blocks of two > > consecutively written files are adjacent. > > > > Test VM: 8p, 8GB RAM, 4xSSD in RAID0, 100TB sparse XFS filesystem, > > metadata CRCs enabled. > > > > Kernel: 3.10-rc5 + xfsdev + my 3.11 xfs queue (~70 patches) > > > > Test: > > > > $ ./fs_mark -D 10000 -S0 -n 10000 -s 4096 -L 120 -d > > /mnt/scratch/0 -d /mnt/scratch/1 -d /mnt/scratch/2 -d > > /mnt/scratch/3 -d /mnt/scratch/4 -d /mnt/scratch/5 -d > > /mnt/scratch/6 -d /mnt/scratch/7 > > > > Result: > > > > wall sys create rate Physical write IO > > time CPU (avg files/s) IOPS Bandwidth > > ----- ----- ------------ ------ --------- > > unpatched 6m56s 15m47s 24,000+/-500 26,000 130MB/s > > patched 5m06s 13m28s 32,800+/-600 1,500 180MB/s > > improvement -26.44% -14.68% +36.67% -94.23% +38.46% > > > > If I use zero length files, this workload at about 500 IOPS, so > > plugging drops the data IOs from roughly 25,500/s to 1000/s. > > 3 lines of code, 35% better throughput for 15% less CPU. > > > > The benefits of plugging at this layer are likely to be higher for > > spinning media as the IO patterns for this workload are going make a > > much bigger difference on high IO latency devices..... > > > > Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx> > Just one question: Won't this cause a regression when files are say 2 MB > large? Then we generate maximum sized requests for these files with > per-inode plugging anyway and they will unnecessarily sit in the plug list > until the plug list gets full (that is after 16 requests). Granted it > shouldn't be too long but with fast storage it may be measurable... Latency of IO dispatch only matters for the initial IOs being queued. This, however, is not a latency sensitive IO path - writeback is our bulk throughput IO engine, and in those cases low latency dispatch is precisely what we don't want. We want to optimise IO patterns for maximum *bandwidth*, not minimal latency. The problem is that fast storage with immediate dispatch and dep queues can keep ahead of IO dispatch, preventing throughput optimisations like IO aggregation from being made because there is never any IO queued to aggregate. That's why I'm seeing a couple of orders of magnitude higher IOPS than I should. Sure, the hardware can do that, but it's not the *most efficient* method of dispatching background IO. Allowing IOs a chance to aggregate in the scheduler for a short while because dispatch allows existing bulk throughput optimisations to be made to the IO stream, and as we can see, where a delayed allocation filesystem is optimised for adjacent allocation across sequentially written inodes such oppportunites for IO aggregation make a big difference to performance. So, to test your 2MB IO case, I ran a fsmark test using 40,000 2MB files instead of 10 million 4k files. wall time IOPS BW mmotm 170s 1000 350MB/s patched 167s 1000 350MB/s The IO profiles are near enough to be identical, and the wall time is basically the same. I just don't see any particular concern about larger IOs and initial dispatch latency here from either a theoretical or an observed POV. Indeed, I haven't seen a performance degradation as a result of this patch in any of the testing I've done since I first posted it... > Now if we have maximum sized request in the plug list, maybe we could just > dispatch it right away but that's another story. That, in itself is potentially an issue, too, as it prevents seek minimisation optimisations from being made when we batch up multiple IOs on the plug list... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- 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
