Re: [PATCH 0/6 v6][RFC] jbd[2]: enhance fsync performance when usingCFQ

From: Tao Ma
Date: Tue Jul 06 2010 - 02:29:42 EST


Hi Jeff,

On 07/03/2010 03:58 AM, Jeff Moyer wrote:
Hi,

Running iozone or fs_mark with fsync enabled, the performance of CFQ is
far worse than that of deadline for enterprise class storage when dealing
with file sizes of 8MB or less. I used the following command line as a
representative test case:

fs_mark -S 1 -D 10000 -N 100000 -d /mnt/test/fs_mark -s 65536 -t 1 -w 4096 -F

I ran the script with "35-rc4 + this patch version" for an ocfs2 volume, and get no hang now. Thanks for the work. I also have some number for you. See below.

Because the iozone process is issuing synchronous writes, it is put
onto CFQ's SYNC service tree. The significance of this is that CFQ
will idle for up to 8ms waiting for requests on such queues. So,
what happens is that the iozone process will issue, say, 64KB worth
of write I/O. That I/O will just land in the page cache. Then, the
iozone process does an fsync which forces those I/Os to disk as
synchronous writes. Then, the file system's fsync method is invoked,
and for ext3/4, it calls log_start_commit followed by log_wait_commit.
Because those synchronous writes were forced out in the context of the
iozone process, CFQ will now idle on iozone's cfqq waiting for more I/O.
However, iozone's progress is gated by the journal thread, now.

With this patch series applied (in addition to the two other patches I
sent [1]), CFQ now achieves 530.82 files / second.

I also wanted to improve the performance of the fsync-ing process in the
presence of a competing sequential reader. The workload I used for that
was a fio job that did sequential buffered 4k reads while running the fs_mark
process. The run-time was 30 seconds, except where otherwise noted.

Deadline got 450 files/second while achieving a throughput of 78.2 MB/s for
the sequential reader. CFQ, unpatched, did not finish an fs_mark run
in 30 seconds. I had to bump the time of the test up to 5 minutes, and then
CFQ saw an fs_mark performance of 6.6 files/second and sequential reader
throughput of 137.2MB/s.

The fs_mark process was being starved as the WRITE_SYNC I/O is marked
with RQ_NOIDLE, and regular WRITES are part of the async workload by
default. So, a single request would be served from either the fs_mark
process or the journal thread, and then they would give up the I/O
scheduler.

After applying this patch set, CFQ can now perform 113.2 files/second while
achieving a throughput of 78.6 MB/s for the sequential reader. In table
form, the results (all averages of 5 runs) look like this:

just just
fs_mark fio mixed
-------------------------------+--------------
deadline 529.44 151.4 | 450.0 78.2
vanilla cfq 107.88 164.4 | 6.6 137.2
patched cfq 530.82 158.7 | 113.2 78.6
Just some updates from the test of ocfs2.
fs_mark
------------------------
deadline 386.3
vanilla cfq 59.7
patched cfq 366.2

So there is really a fantastic improvement at least from what fs_mark gives us. Great thanks.

Regards,
Tao
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