Re: IO scheduler, queue depth, nr_requests

Nick Piggin
2004-02-19T22:52:45Z

Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:

>On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 11:19:15, Jens Axboe wrote:
>
>>On Thu, Feb 19 2004, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>Shouldn't the controller itself be performing the insertion?
>>>>
>>>Well, you would indeed expect the 3ware hardware to be smarter than
>>>that, but in its defence, the driver doesn't set sdev->simple_tags or
>>>sdev->ordered_tags at all. It just has a large queue on the host, in
>>>hardware.
>>>
>>A too large queue. IMHO the simple and correct solution to your problem
>>is to diminish the host queue (sane solution), or bump the block layer
>>queue size (dumb solution).
>>
>
>Well, I did that. Lowering the queue size of the 3ware controller to 64
>does help a bit, but performance is still not optimal - leaving it at 254
>and increasing the nr_requests of the queue to 512 helps the most.
>
>But the patch I posted does just as well, without any tuning. I changed
>it a little though - it only has the "new" behaviour (instead of blocking
>on allocating a request, allocate it, queue it, _then_ block) for WRITEs.
>That results in the best performance I've seen, by far.
>
>

That's because you are half introducing per-process limits.

>Now the style of my patch might be ugly, but what is conceptually wrong
>with allocating the request and queueing it, then block if the queue is
>full, versus blocking on allocating the request and keeping a bio
>"stuck" for quite some time, resulting in out-of-order requests to the
>hardware ?
>
>

Conceptually? The concept that you have everything you need to
continue and yet you block anyway is wrong.

>Note that this is not an issue of '2 processes writing to 1 file', really.
>It's one process and pdflush writing the same dirty pages of the same file.
>
>

pdflush is a process though, that's all that matters.