Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC v2 0/5] Multi-queue support for xen-blkfront and xen-blkback

[Marcus Granado <marcus.granado@citrix.com>]

On 13/05/15 11:29, Bob Liu wrote:
>
> On 04/28/2015 03:46 PM, Arianna Avanzini wrote:
>> Hello Christoph,
>>
>> Il 28/04/2015 09:36, Christoph Hellwig ha scritto:
>>> What happened to this patchset?
>>>
>>
>> It was passed on to Bob Liu, who published a follow-up patchset here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/2/15/46
>>
>
> Right, and then I was interrupted by another xen-block feature: 'multi-page' ring.
> Will back on this patchset soon. Thank you!
>
> -Bob
>

Hi,

Our measurements for the multiqueue patch indicate a clear improvement 
in iops when more queues are used.

The measurements were obtained under the following conditions:

- using blkback as the dom0 backend with the multiqueue patch applied to 
a dom0 kernel 4.0 on 8 vcpus.

- using a recent Ubuntu 15.04 kernel 3.19 with multiqueue frontend 
applied to be used as a guest on 4 vcpus

- using a micron RealSSD P320h as the underlying local storage on a Dell 
PowerEdge R720 with 2 Xeon E5-2643 v2 cpus.

- fio 2.2.7-22-g36870 as the generator of synthetic loads in the guest. 
We used direct_io to skip caching in the guest and ran fio for 60s 
reading a number of block sizes ranging from 512 bytes to 4MiB. Queue 
depth of 32 for each queue was used to saturate individual vcpus in the 
guest.

We were interested in observing storage iops for different values of 
block sizes. Our expectation was that iops would improve when increasing 
the number of queues, because both the guest and dom0 would be able to 
make use of more vcpus to handle these requests.

These are the results (as aggregate iops for all the fio threads) that 
we got for the conditions above with sequential reads:

fio_threads  io_depth  block_size   1-queue_iops  8-queue_iops
     8           32       512           158K         264K
     8           32        1K           157K         260K
     8           32        2K           157K         258K
     8           32        4K           148K         257K
     8           32        8K           124K         207K
     8           32       16K            84K         105K
     8           32       32K            50K          54K
     8           32       64K            24K          27K
     8           32      128K            11K          13K

8-queue iops was better than single queue iops for all the block sizes. 
There were very good improvements as well for sequential writes with 
block size 4K (from 80K iops with single queue to 230K iops with 8 
queues), and no regressions were visible in any measurement performed.

Marcus