Re: [SPDK] Performance Scaling in BlobFS/RocksDB by Multiple I/O Threads

[Walker, Benjamin <benjamin.walker at intel.com>]

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On Wed, 2018-01-31 at 17:49 +0000, Fenggang Wu wrote:
> Hi All, 
> 
> I read from the SPDK doc "NVMe Driver Design -- Scaling Performance" (here),
> which saids:
> 
> " For example, if a device claims to be capable of 450,000 I/O per second at
> queue depth 128, in practice it does not matter if the driver is using 4 queue
> pairs each with queue depth 32, or a single queue pair with queue depth 128."
> 
> Does this consider the queuing latency? I am guessing the latency in the two
> cases will be different ( in qp/qd = 4/32 and in qp/qd = 1/128). In the 4
> threads case, the latency will be 1/4 of the 1 thread case. Do I get it right?

Officially, it is entirely up to the internal design of the device. But for the
NVMe devices I've encountered on the market today you can use as a mental model
a single thread inside the SSD processing incoming messages that correspond to
doorbell writes. It simply takes the doorbell write message and does simple math
 to calculate where the command is located in host memory, and then issues a DMA
to pull it into device local memory. It doesn't matter which queue the I/O is on
- the math is the same. So no, the latency of 1 queue pair at 128 queue depth is
the same as 4 queue pairs at 32 queue depth.

> If so, then I got confused as the document also says:
> 
> "In order to take full advantage of this scaling, applications should consider
> organizing their internal data structures such that data is assigned
> exclusively to a single thread."
> 
> Please correct me if I get it wrong. I understand that if the dedicate I/O
> thread has the total ownership of the I/O data structures, there is no lock
> contention to slow down the I/O. I believe that BlobFS is also designed in
> this philosophy in that only one thread is doing I/O. 
> 
> But considering the RocksDB case, if the shared data structure has already
> been largely taken care of by the RocksDB logic via locking (which is
> inevitable anyway), the I/O requests each RocksDB thread sends to the BlobFS
> could also has its own queue pair to do I/O. More I/O threads means shorter
> queue depth and smaller queuing delay. 

> Even if there is some FS metadata operations that may require some locking,
> but I would guest such metadata operation takes only a small portion.
> 
> Therefore, is it a viable idea to have more I/O threads in the BlobFS to serve
> the multi-threaded RocksDB for a smaller delay? What will be the pitfalls, or
> challenges?

You're right that RocksDB has already worked out all of its internal data
sharing using locks. It then uses a thread pool to issue simultaneous blocking
I/O requests to the filesystem. That's where the SPDK RocksDB backend
intercepts. As you suspect, the filesystem itself (BlobFS, in this case) has
shared data structures that must be coordinated for some operations (creating
and deleting files, resizing files, etc. - but not regular read/write). That's a
small part of the reason why we elected, in our first attempt at writing a
RocksDB backend, to route all I/O from each thread in the thread pool to a
single thread doing asynchronous I/O.

The main reason we route all I/O to a single thread, however, is to minimize CPU
usage. RocksDB makes blocking calls on all threads in the thread pool. We could
implement that in SPDK by spinning in a tight loop, polling for the I/O to
complete. But that means every thread in the RocksDB thread pool would be
burning the full core. Instead, we send all I/O to a single thread that is
polling for completions, and put the threads in the pool to sleep on a
semaphore. When an I/O completes, we send a message back to the originating
thread and kick the semaphore to wake it up. This introduces some latency (but
the rest of SPDK is more than fast enough to compensate for that), but it saves
a lot of CPU usage.

In an ideal world, we'd be integrating with a fully asynchronous K/V database,
where the user could call Put() or Get() and have it return immediately and call
a callback when the data was actually inserted. But that's just not how RocksDB
works today. Even the background thread pool doing compaction is designed to do
blocking operations. It would integrate with SPDK much better if it instead had
a smaller set of threads each doing asynchronous compaction operations on a
whole set of files at once. Changing RocksDB in this way is a huge lift, but
would be an impressive project.

> 
> 
> 
> Any thoughts/comments are appreciated. Thank you very much!
> 
> Best!
> -Fenggang
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