Re: How can I boost block I/O performance

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Sat May 06 2006 - 15:33:09 EST


Dave Pitts wrote:
Hello all:

I've been trying some hacks to boost disk I/O performance mostly by changing values
in the /proc/sys/vm filesystem. A vmstat display shows bursty block out counts with
fairly consistent interrupt counts:

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
4 0 720 80252 1820 7077456 0 0 9 852 5 11 1 14 84 0
[...]
5 0 720 90364 1860 7067080 0 0 40 66956 17995 95384 0 17 82 0

This test is running several NFS clients to a RAID disk storage array. I also see the
same behavior when running SFTP transfers. What I'd like is a more even block
out behavior (even at the expense of other apps as this is a file server not an app
server). The values that I've been hacking are the dirty_writeback_centisecs,
dirty_background_ratio, etc. Am I barking up the wrong tree?
No iowait time, plenty of idle time: looks like you are network bound. What time of network are you running?

--
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.

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