Re: CFQ slower than NOOP with pgbench

Vivek Goyal
2010-02-11T19:30:53Z

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 02:14:17PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Thu 11-02-10 09:40:33, Nikanth Karthikesan wrote:
> > On Thursday 11 February 2010 04:02:55 Jan Kara wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I was playing with a pgbench benchmark - it runs a series of operations
> > > on top of PostgreSQL database. I was using:
> > > pgbench -c 8 -t 2000 pgbench
> > > which runs 8 threads and each thread does 2000 transactions over the
> > > database. The funny thing is that the benchmark does ~70 tps (transactions
> > > per second) with CFQ and ~90 tps with a NOOP io scheduler. This is with
> > > 2.6.32 kernel.
> > > The load on the IO subsystem basically looks like lots of random reads
> > > interleaved with occasional short synchronous sequential writes (the
> > > database does write immediately followed by fdatasync) to the database
> > > logs. I was pondering for quite some time why CFQ is slower and I've tried
> > > tuning it in various ways without success. What I found is that with NOOP
> > > scheduler, the fdatasync is like 20-times faster on average than with CFQ.
> > > Looking at the block traces (available on request) this is usually because
> > > when fdatasync is called, it takes time before the timeslice of the process
> > > doing the sync comes (other processes are using their timeslices for reads)
> > > and writes are dispatched... The question is: Can we do something about
> > > that? Because I'm currently out of ideas except for hacks like "run this
> > > queue immediately if it's fsync" or such...
> >
> > I guess, noop would be hurting those reads which is also a synchronous
> > operation like fsync. But it doesn't seem to have a huge negative impact on
> > the pgbench. Is it because reads are random in this benchmark and delaying
> > them might even help by getting new requests for sectors in between two random
> > reads? If that is the case, I dont think fsync should be given higher priority
> > than reads based on this benchmark.
> >
> > Can you make the blktrace available?
> OK, traces are available from:
> http://beta.suse.com/private/jack/pgbench-cfq-noop/pgbench-blktrace.tar.gz
>

I had a quick look at the blktrace of cfq. Looks like CFQ is idling on
random read sync queues also and that could be one reason contributing to
reduced throughput of pgpbench. This helpled in reducing random workload
latencies in the presence of other sequential read or write going on.

Later corrodo changed the logic to do group wait on all random readers
instead of individual queue.

Can you please try latest kernel 2.6.32-rc7 and see if you still see the
issue. This version does group wait on random readers as well as drives
deeper queue depths for writers. (deeper queue depth might not help on
SATA but does help if multiple spindles are behind RAID card).

Or, if your SATA, disk suppports NCQ, then just set low_latency=0 on
2.6.32 kernel. Looking at 2.6.32 code, it looks like that will also
disable idling on random reader queues.

Thanks
Vivek

> I've tried also two tests: I've run the database with LD_PRELOAD so that
> fdatasync does
> a) nothing
> b) calls sync_file_range(fd, 0, LLONG_MAX, SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE)
> c) calls posix_fadvise(fd, 0, LLONG_MAX, POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED)
> - it does filemap_flush() which was my main aim..
>
> The results (CFQ as a IO scheduler) are interesting. In a) the performance
> was slightly higher than with NOOP scheduler and fully functional fdatasync.
> Not surprising - we spend only like 2 s (out of ~200) in fdatasync with NOOP
> scheduler.
> In b) the performance was only about 2% better than with full fdatasync
> (with NOOP scheduler, it's ~20% better). Looking at the strace
> output, it seems sync_file_range() takes as long as fdatasync() took -
> probably because we are waiting for PageWriteback or lock_page.
> In c) the performance was ~11% better - fadvise calls seem to be quite
> quick - comparable times between CFQ and NOOP. So higher latency of fdatasync
> seems to be at least part of a problem...
>
> Honza
> --
> Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
> SUSE Labs, CR
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