From: Wu Fengguang Subject: Re: Slow file transfer speeds with CFQ IO scheduler in some cases Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:34:02 +0800 Message-ID: <20090216023402.GA6199@localhost> References: <492BE47B.3010802@vlnb.net> <20081125114908.GA16545@localhost> <492BE97A.3050606@vlnb.net> <492BEAE8.9050809@vlnb.net> <20081125121534.GA16778@localhost> <492EDCFB.7080302@vlnb.net> <20081128004830.GA8874@localhost> <49946BE6.1040005@vlnb.net> <20090213015721.GA5565@localhost> <4995D339.5050502@vlnb.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Jens Axboe , Jeff Moyer , "Vitaly V. Bursov" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org To: Vladislav Bolkhovitin Return-path: Received: from mga09.intel.com ([134.134.136.24]:50020 "EHLO mga09.intel.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752407AbZBPCeG (ORCPT ); Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:34:06 -0500 In-Reply-To: <4995D339.5050502-d+Crzxg7Rs0@public.gmane.org> Sender: linux-nfs-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:08:25PM +0300, Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote: > Wu Fengguang, on 02/13/2009 04:57 AM wrote: >> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 09:35:18PM +0300, Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote: >>> Sorry for such a huge delay. There were many other activities I had >>> to do before + I had to be sure I didn't miss anything. >>> >>> We didn't use NFS, we used SCST (http://scst.sourceforge.net) with >>> iSCSI-SCST target driver. It has similar to NFS architecture, where N >>> threads (N=5 in this case) handle IO from remote initiators >>> (clients) coming from wire using iSCSI protocol. In addition, SCST >>> has patch called export_alloc_io_context (see >>> http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/10/282), which allows for the IO threads >>> queue IO using single IO context, so we can see if context RA can >>> replace grouping IO threads in single IO context. >>> >>> Unfortunately, the results are negative. We find neither any >>> advantages of context RA over current RA implementation, nor >>> possibility for context RA to replace grouping IO threads in single >>> IO context. >>> >>> Setup on the target (server) was the following. 2 SATA drives grouped >>> in md RAID-0 with average local read throughput ~120MB/s ("dd >>> if=/dev/zero of=/dev/md0 bs=1M count=20000" outputs "20971520000 >>> bytes (21 GB) copied, 177,742 s, 118 MB/s"). The md device was >>> partitioned on 3 partitions. The first partition was 10% of space in >>> the beginning of the device, the last partition was 10% of space in >>> the end of the device, the middle one was the rest in the middle of >>> the space them. Then the first and the last partitions were exported >>> to the initiator (client). They were /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc on it >>> correspondingly. >> >> Vladislav, Thank you for the benchmarks! I'm very interested in >> optimizing your workload and figuring out what happens underneath. >> >> Are the client and server two standalone boxes connected by GBE? > > Yes, they directly connected using GbE. > >> When you set readahead sizes in the benchmarks, you are setting them >> in the server side? I.e. "linux-4dtq" is the SCST server? > > Yes, it's the server. On the client all the parameters were left default. > >> What's the >> client side readahead size? > > Default, i.e. 128K > >> It would help a lot to debug readahead if you can provide the >> server side readahead stats and trace log for the worst case. >> This will automatically answer the above questions as well as disclose >> the micro-behavior of readahead: >> >> mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug >> >> echo > /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/stats # reset counters >> # do benchmark >> cat /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/stats >> >> echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/trace_enable >> # do micro-benchmark, i.e. run the same benchmark for a short time >> echo 0 > /sys/kernel/debug/readahead/trace_enable >> dmesg >> >> The above readahead trace should help find out how the client side >> sequential reads convert into server side random reads, and how we can >> prevent that. > > We will do it as soon as we have a free window on that system. Thank you. For NFS, the client side read/readahead requests will be split into units of rsize which will be served by a pool of nfsd concurrently and possibly out of order. Does SCST have the same process? If so, what's the rsize value for your SCST benchmarks? Thanks, Fengguang