block, bfq: merge bursts of newly-created queues
Many throughput-sensitive workloads are made of several parallel I/O flows, with all flows generated by the same application, or more generically by the same task (e.g., system boot). The most counterproductive action with these workloads is plugging I/O dispatch when one of the bfq_queues associated with these flows remains temporarily empty. To avoid this plugging, BFQ has been using a burst-handling mechanism for years now. This mechanism has proven effective for throughput, and not detrimental for service guarantees. This commit pushes this mechanism a little bit further, basing on the following two facts. First, all the I/O flows of a the same application or task contribute to the execution/completion of that common application or task. So the performance figures that matter are total throughput of the flows and task-wide I/O latency. In particular, these flows do not need to be protected from each other, in terms of individual bandwidth or latency. Second, the above fact holds regardless of the number of flows. Putting these two facts together, this commits merges stably the bfq_queues associated with these I/O flows, i.e., with the processes that generate these IO/ flows, regardless of how many the involved processes are. To decide whether a set of bfq_queues is actually associated with the I/O flows of a common application or task, and to merge these queues stably, this commit operates as follows: given a bfq_queue, say Q2, currently being created, and the last bfq_queue, say Q1, created before Q2, Q2 is merged stably with Q1 if - very little time has elapsed since when Q1 was created - Q2 has the same ioprio as Q1 - Q2 belongs to the same group as Q1 Merging bfq_queues also reduces scheduling overhead. A fio test with ten random readers on /dev/nullb shows a throughput boost of 40%, with a quadcore. Since BFQ's execution time amounts to ~50% of the total per-request processing time, the above throughput boost implies that BFQ's overhead is reduced by more than 50%. Tested-by:Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by:
Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Tested-by:
Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210304174627.161-7-paolo.valente@linaro.orgSigned-off-by:
Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment