Greetings,

I have recently noticed a large difference in performance between thick
and thin LVM volumes and I'm trying to understand why that it the case.

In summary, for the same FIO test (attached), I'm seeing 560k iops on a
thick volume vs. 200k iops for a thin volume and these results are
pretty consistent across different runs.

I noticed that if I run two FIO tests simultaneously on 2 separate thin
pools, I net nearly double the performance of a single pool.  And two
tests on thin volumes within the same pool will split the maximum iops
of the single pool (essentially half).  And I see similar results from
linux 3.10 and 4.6.

I understand that thin must track metadata as part of its design and so
some additional overhead is to be expected, but I'm wondering if we can
narrow the gap a bit.

In case it helps, I also enabled LOCK_STAT and gathered locking
statistics for both thick and thin runs (attached).

I'm curious to know whether this is a know issue, and if I can do
anything the help improve the situation.  I wonder if the use of the
primary spinlock in the pool structure could be improved - the lock
statistics appear to indicate a significant amount of time contending
with that one.  Or maybe it's something else entirely, and in that case
please enlighten me.

If there are any specific questions or tests I can run, I'm happy to do
so.  Let me know how I can help.

-- 
Jon