Re: [PATCH V2 01/20] blk-mq-sched: fix scheduler bad performance

Ming Lei
2017-08-21T08:18:45Z

On Wed, Aug 09, 2017 at 12:11:18AM -0700, Omar Sandoval wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 09, 2017 at 10:32:52AM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:11 AM, Omar Sandoval <osandov@osandov.com> wrote:
> > > On Sat, Aug 05, 2017 at 02:56:46PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> > >> When hw queue is busy, we shouldn't take requests from
> > >> scheduler queue any more, otherwise IO merge will be
> > >> difficult to do.
> > >>
> > >> This patch fixes the awful IO performance on some
> > >> SCSI devices(lpfc, qla2xxx, ...) when mq-deadline/kyber
> > >> is used by not taking requests if hw queue is busy.
> > >
> > > Jens added this behavior in 64765a75ef25 ("blk-mq-sched: ask scheduler
> > > for work, if we failed dispatching leftovers"). That change was a big
> > > performance improvement, but we didn't figure out why. We'll need to dig
> > > up whatever test Jens was doing to make sure it doesn't regress.
> >
> > Not found info about Jen's test case on this commit from google.
> >
> > Maybe Jens could provide some input about your test case?
>
> Okay I found my previous discussion with Jens (it was an off-list
> discussion). The test case was xfs/297 from xfstests: after
> 64765a75ef25, the test went from taking ~300 seconds to ~200 seconds on
> his SCSI device.
>
> > In theory, if hw queue is busy and requests are left in ->dispatch,
> > we should not have continued to dequeue requests from sw/scheduler queue
> > any more. Otherwise, IO merge can be hurt much. At least on SCSI devices,
> > this improved much on sequential I/O, at least 3X of sequential
> > read is increased on lpfc with this patch, in case of mq-deadline.
>
> Right, your patch definitely makes more sense intuitively.
>
> > Or are there other special cases in which we still need
> > to push requests hard into a busy hardware?
>
> xfs/297 does a lot of fsyncs and hence a lot of flushes, that could be
> the special case.

OK, thanks a lot for this input, and I will run xfs/297 with this
patchset to see if performance is degraded.

--
Ming