Re: [ISSUE] The time cost of IOSQE_IO_LINK

Jens Axboe
2020-02-13T15:14:51Z

On 2/13/20 8:08 AM, Pavel Begunkov wrote:
> On 2/13/2020 3:33 AM, Carter Li 李通洲 wrote:
>> Thanks for your reply.
>>
>> You are right the nop isn't really a good test case. But I actually
>> found this issue when benchmarking my echo server, which didn't use
>> NOP of course.
>
> If there are no hidden subtle issues in io_uring, your benchmark or the
> used pattern itself, it's probably because of overhead on async punting
> (copying iovecs, several extra switches, refcounts, grabbing mm/fs/etc,
> io-wq itself).
>
> I was going to tune async/punting stuff anyway, so I'll look into this.
> And of course, there is always a good chance Jens have some bright insights

The main issue here is that if you do the poll->recv, then it'll be
an automatic punt of the recv to async context when the poll completes.
That's regardless of whether or not we can complete the poll inline,
we never attempt to recv inline from that completion. This is in contrast
to doing a separate poll, getting the notification, then doing another
sqe and io_uring_enter to perform the recv. For this case, we end up
doing everything inline, just with the cost of an additional system call
to submit the new recv.

It'd be really cool if we could improve on this situation, as recv (or
read) preceded by a poll is indeed a common use case. Or ditto for the
write side.

> BTW, what's benefit of doing poll(fd)->read(fd), but not directly read()?

If there's no data to begin with, then the read will go async. Hence
it'll be a switch to a worker thread. The above should avoid it, but
it doesn't.

For carter's sake, it's worth nothing that the poll command is special
and normal requests would be more efficient with links. We just need
to work on making the poll linked with read/write perform much better.

--
Jens Axboe