Re: Slow file transfer speeds with CFQ IO scheduler in some cases

[Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>]

On Thu, Nov 13 2008, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> //Sorry for being late. 
> 
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 08:02:28PM +0100, Jens Axboe wrote:
> [...]
> > I already talked about this with Jeff on irc, but I guess should post it
> > here as well.
> > 
> > nfsd aside (which does seem to have some different behaviour skewing the
> > results), the original patch came about because dump(8) has a really
> > stupid design that offloads IO to a number of processes. This basically
> > makes fairly sequential IO more random with CFQ, since each process gets
> > its own io context. My feeling is that we should fix dump instead of
> > introducing a fair bit of complexity (and slowdown) in CFQ. I'm not
> > aware of any other good programs out there that would do something
> > similar, so I don't think there's a lot of merrit to spending cycles on
> > detecting cooperating processes.
> > 
> > Jeff will take a look at fixing dump instead, and I may have promised
> > him that santa will bring him something nice this year if he does (since
> > I'm sure it'll be painful on the eyes).
> 
> This could also be fixed at the VFS readahead level.
> 
> In fact I've seen many kinds of interleaved accesses:
> - concurrently reading 40 files that are in fact hard links of one single file
> - a backup tool that splits a big file into 8k chunks, and serve the
>   {1, 3, 5, 7, ...} chunks in one process and the {0, 2, 4, 6, ...}
>   chunks in another one
> - a pool of NFSDs randomly serving some originally sequential read requests 
> - now dump(8) seems to have some similar problem.
> 
> In summary there have been all kinds of efforts on trying to
> parallelize I/O tasks, but unfortunately they can easily screw up the
> sequential pattern. It may not be easily fixable for many of them.
> 
> It is however possible to detect most of these patterns at the
> readahead layer and restore sequential I/Os, before they propagate
> into the block layer and hurt performance.
> 
> Vitaly, if that's what you need, I can try to prepare a patch for
> testing out.

It's not easy. To really fix it, you have to get that sequential RA
pattern from just the single process. As soon as you spread the IO
between processes (eg N-1 aren't just getting cache hits), then you may
run into trouble on the IO scheduler side.

-- 
Jens Axboe