Re: [PATCH] cfq-iosched: quantum check tweak --resend

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

On Mon, Mar 01 2010, Shaohua Li wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 04:19:20PM +0800, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 01 2010, Shaohua Li wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 04:02:34PM +0800, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Mar 01 2010, Shaohua Li wrote:
> > > > > Currently a queue can only dispatch up to 4 requests if there are other queues.
> > > > > This isn't optimal, device can handle more requests, for example, AHCI can
> > > > > handle 31 requests. I can understand the limit is for fairness, but we could
> > > > > do a tweak: if the queue still has a lot of slice left, sounds we could
> > > > > ignore the limit. Test shows this boost my workload (two thread randread of
> > > > > a SSD) from 78m/s to 100m/s.
> > > > > Thanks for suggestions from Corrado and Vivek for the patch.
> > > > 
> > > > As mentioned before, I think we definitely want to ensure that we drive
> > > > the full queue depth whenever possible. I think your patch is a bit
> > > > dangerous, though. The problematic workload here is a buffered write,
> > > > interleaved with the occasional sync reader. If the sync reader has to
> > > > endure 32 requests every time, latency rises dramatically for him.
> > > the patch still matains a hardlimit for dispatched request. For a async,
> > > the limit is cfq_slice_async/cfq_slice_idle = 5. For sync, the limit is 8.
> > > And we only pipe out such number of requests at the begining of a slice.
> > > For the workload you mentioned here, we only dispatch 1 extra request.
> > 
> > OK, that sound appropriate. Final question - why change the quantum and
> > use quantum/2?
> This is suggested by Vivek. In this way quantum is still the hard limit and
> doesn't surprise users. we do throttling at 1/2 quantum (softlimit) and
> then stop at quantum (hard limit)

OK, that makes sense. I will apply the patch, thanks!

-- 
Jens Axboe