Re: Multi Core Support for compression in compression.c

[Nick Krause <xerofoify@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 6:10 AM, Austin S Hemmelgarn
<ahferroin7@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/27/2014 11:21 PM, Nick Krause wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 10:56 PM, Austin S Hemmelgarn
>> <ahferroin7@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 07/27/2014 04:47 PM, Nick Krause wrote:
>>>> This may be a bad idea , but compression in brtfs seems to be only
>>>> using one core to compress.
>>>> Depending on the CPU used and the amount of cores in the CPU we can
>>>> make this much faster
>>>> with multiple cores. This seems bad by my reading at least I would
>>>> recommend for writing compression
>>>> we write a function to use a certain amount of cores based on the load
>>>> of the system's CPU not using
>>>> more then 75% of the system's CPU resources as my system when idle has
>>>> never needed more
>>>> then one core of my i5 2500k to run when with interrupts for opening
>>>> eclipse are running. For reading
>>>> compression on good core seems fine to me as testing other compression
>>>> software for reads , it's
>>>> way less CPU intensive.
>>>> Cheers Nick
>>> We would probably get a bigger benefit from taking an approach like
>>> SquashFS has recently added, that is, allowing multi-threaded
>>> decompression fro reads, and decompressing directly into the pagecache.
>>>  Such an approach would likely make zlib compression much more scalable
>>> on large systems.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Austin,
>> That seems better then my idea as you seem to be more up to date on
>> brtfs devolopment.
>> If you and the other developers of brtfs are interested in adding this
>> as a feature please let
>> me known as I would like to help improve brtfs as the file system as
>> an idea is great just
>> seems like it needs a lot of work :).
>> Nick
> I wouldn't say that I am a BTRFS developer (power user maybe?), but I
> would definitely say that parallelizing compression on writes would be a
> good idea too (especially for things like lz4, which IIRC is either in
> 3.16 or in the queue for 3.17).  Both options would be a lot of work,
> but almost any performance optimization would.  I would almost say that
> it would provide a bigger performance improvement to get BTRFS to
> intelligently stripe reads and writes (at the moment, any given worker
> thread only dispatches one write or read to a single device at a time,
> and any given write() or read() syscall gets handled by only one worker).
>

I will look into this idea and see if I can do this for writes.
Regards Nick