Re: [PATCH] deadline io scheduler

Jens Axboe
2002-09-26T06:39:51Z

On Wed, Sep 25 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> This is looking good. With a little more tuning and tweaking
> this problem is solved.
>
> The horror test was:
>
> cd /usr/src/linux
> dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1M count=4000
> sleep 5
> time cat kernel/*.c > /dev/null
>
> Testing on IDE (this matters - SCSI is very different)

Yes, SCSI specific stuff comes next.

> - On 2.5.38 + souped-up VM it was taking 25 seconds.
>
> - My read-latency patch took 1 second-odd.
>
> - Linus' rework yesterday was taking 0.3 seconds.
>
> - With Linus' current tree (with the deadline scheduler) it now takes
> 5 seconds.
>
> Let's see what happens as we vary read_expire:
>
> read_expire (ms) time cat kernel/*.c (secs)
> 500 5.2
> 400 3.8
> 300 4.5
> 200 3.9
> 100 5.1
> 50 5.0
>
> well that was a bit of a placebo ;)

For this work load, more on that later.

> Let's leave read_expire at 500ms and diddle writes_starved:
>
> writes_starved (units) time cat kernel/*.c (secs)
> 1 4.8
> 2 4.4
> 4 4.0
> 8 4.9
> 16 4.9

Interesting

> Now alter fifo_batch, everything else default:
>
> fifo_batch (units) time cat kernel/*.c (secs)
> 64 5.0
> 32 2.0
> 16 0.2
> 8 0.17
>
> OK, that's a winner.

Cool, I'm resting benchmarks with 16 as the default now. I fear this
might be too agressive, and that 32 will be a decent value.

> Here's something really nice with the deadline scheduler. I was
> madly catting five separate kernel trees (five reading processes)
> and then started a big `dd', tunables at default:
>
> procs memory swap io system cpu
> r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id
> 0 9 0 6008 2460 8304 324716 0 0 2048 0 1102 254 13 88 0
> 0 7 0 6008 2600 8288 324480 0 0 1800 0 1114 266 0 100 0
> 0 6 0 6008 2452 8292 324520 0 0 2432 0 1126 287 29 71 0
> 0 6 0 6008 3160 8292 323952 0 0 3568 0 1132 312 0 100 0
> 0 6 0 6008 2860 8296 324148 128 0 2984 0 1119 281 17 83 0
> 1 6 0 5984 2856 8264 323816 352 0 5240 0 1162 479 0 100 0
> 0 7 1 5984 4152 7876 324068 0 0 1648 28192 1215 1572 1 99 0
> 0 9 2 6016 3136 7300 328568 0 180 1232 37248 1324 1201 3 97 0
> 0 9 2 6020 5260 5628 329212 0 4 1112 29488 1296 560 0 100 0
> 0 9 3 6020 3548 5596 330944 0 0 1064 35240 1302 629 6 94 0
> 0 9 3 6020 3412 5572 331352 0 0 744 31744 1298 452 6 94 0
> 0 9 2 6020 1516 5576 333352 0 0 888 31488 1283 467 0 100 0
> 0 9 2 6020 3528 5580 331396 0 0 1312 20768 1251 385 0 100 0
>
> Note how the read rate maybe halved, and we sustained a high
> volume of writeback. This is excellent.

Yep

> Let's try it again with fifo_batch at 16:
>
> 0 5 0 80 303936 3960 49288 0 0 2520 0 1092 174 0 100 0
> 0 5 0 80 302400 3996 50776 0 0 3040 0 1094 172 20 80 0
> 0 5 0 80 301164 4032 51988 0 0 2504 0 1082 150 0 100 0
> 0 5 0 80 299708 4060 53412 0 0 2904 0 1084 149 0 100 0
> 1 5 1 80 164640 4060 186784 0 0 1344 26720 1104 891 1 99 0
> 0 6 2 80 138900 4060 212088 0 0 280 7928 1039 226 0 100 0
> 0 6 2 80 134992 4064 215928 0 0 1512 7704 1100 226 0 100 0
> 0 6 2 80 130880 4068 219976 0 0 1928 9688 1124 245 17 83 0
> 0 6 2 80 123316 4084 227432 0 0 2664 8200 1125 283 11 89 0
>
> That looks acceptable. Writes took quite a bit of punishment, but
> the VM should cope with that OK.
>
> It'd be interesting to know why read_expire and writes_starved have
> no effect, while fifo_batch has a huge effect.
>
> I'd like to gain a solid understanding of what these three knobs do.
> Could you explain that a little more?

Sure. The reason you are not seeing a big change with read expire, is
that you basically only have one thread issuing reads. Once you start
flooding the queue with more threads doing reads, then read expire just
puts a lid on the max latency that will incur. So you are probably not
hitting the read expire logic at all, or just slightly.

The three tunables are:

read_expire. This one controls how old a request can be, before we
attempt to move it to the dispatch queue. This is the starvation logic
for the read list. When a read expires, the other nobs control what the
behaviour is.

fifo_batch. This one controls how big a batch of requests we move from
the sort lists to the dispatch queue. The idea was that we don't want to
move single requests, since that might cause seek storms. Instead we
move a batch of request, starting at the expire head for reads if
necessary, along the sorted list to the dispatch queue. fifo_batch is
the total cost that can be endured, a total of seeks and non-seeky
requests. With you fifo_batch at 16, we can only move on seeky request
to the dispatch queue. Or we can move 16 non-seeky requests. Or a few
non-seeky request, and a seeky one. You get the idea.

writes_starved. This controls how many times reads get preferred over
writes. The default is 2, which means that we can serve two batches of
reads over one write batch. A value of 4 would mean that reads could
skip ahead of writes 4 times. A value of 1 would give you 1:1
read:write, ie no read preference. A silly value of 0 would give you
write preference, always.

Hope this helps?

> During development I'd suggest the below patch, to add
> /proc/sys/vm/read_expire, fifo_batch and writes_starved - it beats
> recompiling each time.

It sure does, I either want to talk Al into making the ioschedfs (better
name will be selected :-) or try and do it myself so we can do this
properly.

> I'll test scsi now.

Cool. I found a buglet that causes incorrect accounting when moving
request if the dispatch queue is not empty. Attached.

===== drivers/block/deadline-iosched.c 1.1 vs edited =====
--- 1.1/drivers/block/deadline-iosched.c Wed Sep 25 21:16:26 2002
+++ edited/drivers/block/deadline-iosched.c Thu Sep 26 08:33:35 2002
@@ -254,6 +254,15 @@
struct list_head *sort_head = &dd->sort_list[rq_data_dir(rq)];
sector_t last_sec = dd->last_sector;
int batch_count = dd->fifo_batch;
+
+ /*
+ * if dispatch is non-empty, disregard last_sector and check last one
+ */
+ if (!list_empty(dd->dispatch)) {
+ struct request *__rq = list_entry_rq(dd->dispatch->prev);
+
+ last_sec = __rq->sector + __rq->nr_sectors;
+ }

do {
struct list_head *nxt = rq->queuelist.next;

--
Jens Axboe