I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Dennis Yang]

Hi,

I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
until the delete process finish.

For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
issue.

I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
problem.

Any help would be grateful.
Dennis

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Zdenek Kabelac]

Dne 20.1.2016 v 11:05 Dennis Yang napsal(a):
> Hi,
>
> I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
> when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
> is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
> which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
> deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
> to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
> Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
> lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
> until the delete process finish.
>
> For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
> deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
> requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
> throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
> issue.
>
> I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
> hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
> is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
> problem.

Hi

What is your use case.

You may possibly split the load between several thin-pools ?

Current design is not targeted to simultaneously maintain very large number
of active thin-volumes within a single thin-pool.


Zdenek

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Dennis Yang]

Hi,

Thanks for replying.

In my use case, I will have couples of 50TB thin devices (less than
20) with different services running on them. Also, I will take hourly
read-only snapshot on some of these thin devices and prevent one
single thin device from having over 1024 snapshots by deleting the
oldest snapshot when it has to. During the deletion of a snapshot or a
thin device, I/O gets blocked and some of the latency-sensitive
services stop and return error code.

I am aware of that the current design is not suitable for me to put
all the thin devices on the same pool. However, It seems that this I/O
blocking problem will still exist even when I have only one thin
device and couple of read-only snapshots of it on the same pool.

Dennis

2016-01-20 19:27 GMT+08:00 Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac@redhat.com>:
> Dne 20.1.2016 v 11:05 Dennis Yang napsal(a):
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
>> when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
>> is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
>> which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
>> deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
>> to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
>> Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
>> lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
>> until the delete process finish.
>>
>> For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
>> deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
>> requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
>> throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
>> issue.
>>
>> I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
>> hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
>> is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
>> problem.
>
>
> Hi
>
> What is your use case.
>
> You may possibly split the load between several thin-pools ?
>
> Current design is not targeted to simultaneously maintain very large number
> of active thin-volumes within a single thin-pool.
>
>
> Zdenek
>
> --
> dm-devel mailing list
> dm-devel@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Nikolay Borisov]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 1:27 PM, Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac@redhat.com> wrote:
> Dne 20.1.2016 v 11:05 Dennis Yang napsal(a):
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
>> when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
>> is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
>> which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
>> deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
>> to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
>> Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
>> lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
>> until the delete process finish.
>>
>> For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
>> deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
>> requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
>> throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
>> issue.
>>
>> I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
>> hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
>> is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
>> problem.
>
>
> Hi
>
> What is your use case.
>
> You may possibly split the load between several thin-pools ?
>
> Current design is not targeted to simultaneously maintain very large number
> of active thin-volumes within a single thin-pool.

Sorry of the offtopic, but what would constitute a "Very large number"
- 100, 1000s?

>
>
> Zdenek
>
>
> --
> dm-devel mailing list
> dm-devel@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Mike Snitzer]

> > Dne 20.1.2016 v 11:05 Dennis Yang napsal(a):
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
> >> when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
> >> is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
> >> which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
> >> deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
> >> to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
> >> Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
> >> lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
> >> until the delete process finish.
> >>
> >> For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
> >> deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
> >> requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
> >> throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
> >> issue.
> >>
> >> I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
> >> hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
> >> is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
> >> problem.

Just so I'm aware: which kernel are you using?

dm_pool_delete_thin_device() takes pmd->root_lock so yes it is very
coarse-grained; especially when you consider concurrent IO to another
thin device from the same pool will call interfaces, like
dm_thin_find_block(), which also take the same pmd->root_lock.

It should be noted that the discard performance has improved
considerably with the range discard support (which really didn't
stabilize until Linux 4.4) and then even more improvement in Linux 4.5
with commits like:
3d5f6733 ("dm thin metadata: speed up discard of partially mapped volumes")

> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 1:27 PM, Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac@redhat.com> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > What is your use case.
> >
> > You may possibly split the load between several thin-pools ?
> >
> > Current design is not targeted to simultaneously maintain very large number
> > of active thin-volumes within a single thin-pool.

We have some systemic coarse-grained locking for sure (making things
like device deletion vs normal IO problematic) but if we're talking pure
concurrent IO to many thin devices backed by the same thin-pool we
really should perform reasonably well.

On Thu, Jan 21 2016 at 12:33pm -0500,
Nikolay Borisov <n.borisov@siteground.com> wrote:
 
> Sorry of the offtopic, but what would constitute a "Very large number"
> - 100, 1000s?

TBD really.  Like I said above concurrent IO shouldn't hit locks like
the pool metadata lock (pmd->root_lock) _that_ hard.  But if that IO is
competing with device discard or delete operations then it'll be a
different story.

As it happens I just attended a meeting that emphasized the requirement
to scale to 100s or even 1000 thin devices within a single pool.  So
while there certainly could be painfully pathological locking
bottlenecks that have yet to be exposed I'm fairly confident we'll be
identifying them soon enough.

Any perf-report tool traces that illustrate realized thin-pool
performance bottlenecks are always appreciated.

Mike

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Lars Ellenberg]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 02:44:06PM -0500, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> > > Dne 20.1.2016 v 11:05 Dennis Yang napsal(a):
> > >>
> > >> Hi,
> > >>
> > >> I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
> > >> when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
> > >> is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
> > >> which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
> > >> deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
> > >> to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
> > >> Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
> > >> lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
> > >> until the delete process finish.
> > >>
> > >> For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
> > >> deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
> > >> requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
> > >> throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
> > >> issue.
> > >>
> > >> I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
> > >> hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
> > >> is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
> > >> problem.
> 
> Just so I'm aware: which kernel are you using?
> 
> dm_pool_delete_thin_device() takes pmd->root_lock so yes it is very
> coarse-grained; especially when you consider concurrent IO to another
> thin device from the same pool will call interfaces, like
> dm_thin_find_block(), which also take the same pmd->root_lock.

We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
even ~20 minutes before.
So that means blocking IO to other devices in that pool
(e.g. the typically currently in-use "origin") for minutes.

That was, iirc, with ~10 TB origin, mostly allocated,
tens of "rotating" snapshots, 64k chunk size,
and considerable random write change rate on the origin.

I'd like to propose a different approach for lvremove of thin devices
(using "made up terms" instead of the correct device mapper vocabulary,
because I'm lazy):
on lvremove of a thin device, take all the locks you need,
even if that implies blocking IO to other devices,
BUT
then don't do all the "delete" right there while holding those
locks, but convert the device into a "i-am-currently-removing-myself"
target, and release all the locks. That should be fast (enough).

Then this "i-am-currently-removing-myself" target would have its .open()
return some error, so it cannot even be opened anymore (or something
with similar effect), start some kernel thread that does the actual
"wipe" and "unref/unmap" from the tree and all that stuff "in the
background", using much finer granular temporary locking for each
processed region.

If that then takes 20 minutes, someone may still care, but at least it
does not block IO to the other active devices in the pool.

Or is something like this already going on?

	Lars Ellenberg

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Zdenek Kabelac]

Dne 22.1.2016 v 14:38 Lars Ellenberg napsal(a):
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 02:44:06PM -0500, Mike Snitzer wrote:
>>>> Dne 20.1.2016 v 11:05 Dennis Yang napsal(a):
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
>>>>> when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
>>>>> is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
>>>>> which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
>>>>> deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
>>>>> to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
>>>>> Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
>>>>> lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
>>>>> until the delete process finish.
>>>>>
>>>>> For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
>>>>> deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
>>>>> requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
>>>>> throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
>>>>> issue.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
>>>>> hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
>>>>> is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
>>>>> problem.
>>
>> Just so I'm aware: which kernel are you using?
>>
>> dm_pool_delete_thin_device() takes pmd->root_lock so yes it is very
>> coarse-grained; especially when you consider concurrent IO to another
>> thin device from the same pool will call interfaces, like
>> dm_thin_find_block(), which also take the same pmd->root_lock.
>
> We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
> even ~20 minutes before.
> So that means blocking IO to other devices in that pool
> (e.g. the typically currently in-use "origin") for minutes.
>
> That was, iirc, with ~10 TB origin, mostly allocated,
> tens of "rotating" snapshots, 64k chunk size,
> and considerable random write change rate on the origin.
>
> I'd like to propose a different approach for lvremove of thin devices
> (using "made up terms" instead of the correct device mapper vocabulary,
> because I'm lazy):
> on lvremove of a thin device, take all the locks you need,
> even if that implies blocking IO to other devices,
> BUT
> then don't do all the "delete" right there while holding those
> locks, but convert the device into a "i-am-currently-removing-myself"
> target, and release all the locks. That should be fast (enough).
>
> Then this "i-am-currently-removing-myself" target would have its .open()
> return some error, so it cannot even be opened anymore (or something
> with similar effect), start some kernel thread that does the actual
> "wipe" and "unref/unmap" from the tree and all that stuff "in the
> background", using much finer granular temporary locking for each
> processed region.
>
> If that then takes 20 minutes, someone may still care, but at least it
> does not block IO to the other active devices in the pool.
>
> Or is something like this already going on?
>

Hi

Please always specify kernel in-use.
Eventually retry with last officially released one (e.g. 4.4)
There were number of improvements in speed of discard.

Also - you may try to use thin-pool with '--discards  nopassdown'
(or even ignore) in case TRIM is very limiting factor
(with impacting free space in thin-pool for 'ignore' one)

Zdenek

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Mike Snitzer]

On Fri, Jan 22 2016 at  8:58am -0500,
Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac@redhat.com> wrote:

> Dne 22.1.2016 v 14:38 Lars Ellenberg napsal(a):
> >On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 02:44:06PM -0500, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> >>>>Dne 20.1.2016 v 11:05 Dennis Yang napsal(a):
> >>>>>
> >>>>>Hi,
> >>>>>
> >>>>>I had noticed that I/O requests to one thin device will be blocked
> >>>>>when the other thin device is being deleting. The root cause of this
> >>>>>is that to delete a thin device will eventually call dm_btree_del()
> >>>>>which is a slow function and can block. This means that the device
> >>>>>deleting process will need to hold the pool lock for a very long time
> >>>>>to wait for this function to delete the whole data mapping subtree.
> >>>>>Since I/O to the devices on the same pool needs to held the same pool
> >>>>>lock to lookup/insert/delete data mapping, all I/O will be blocked
> >>>>>until the delete process finish.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>For now, I have to discard all the mappings of a thin device before
> >>>>>deleting it to prevent I/O from being blocked. Since these discard
> >>>>>requests not only take lots of time to finish but hurt the pool I/O
> >>>>>throughput, I am still looking for other better solutions to fix this
> >>>>>issue.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>I think the main problem is still the big pool lock in dm-thin which
> >>>>>hurts both the scalability and performance of. I am wondering if there
> >>>>>is any plan on improving this or any better fix for the I/O block
> >>>>>problem.
> >>
> >>Just so I'm aware: which kernel are you using?
> >>
> >>dm_pool_delete_thin_device() takes pmd->root_lock so yes it is very
> >>coarse-grained; especially when you consider concurrent IO to another
> >>thin device from the same pool will call interfaces, like
> >>dm_thin_find_block(), which also take the same pmd->root_lock.
> >
> >We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
> >even ~20 minutes before.
> >So that means blocking IO to other devices in that pool
> >(e.g. the typically currently in-use "origin") for minutes.
> >
> >That was, iirc, with ~10 TB origin, mostly allocated,
> >tens of "rotating" snapshots, 64k chunk size,
> >and considerable random write change rate on the origin.
> >
> >I'd like to propose a different approach for lvremove of thin devices
> >(using "made up terms" instead of the correct device mapper vocabulary,
> >because I'm lazy):
> >on lvremove of a thin device, take all the locks you need,
> >even if that implies blocking IO to other devices,
> >BUT
> >then don't do all the "delete" right there while holding those
> >locks, but convert the device into a "i-am-currently-removing-myself"
> >target, and release all the locks. That should be fast (enough).
> >
> >Then this "i-am-currently-removing-myself" target would have its .open()
> >return some error, so it cannot even be opened anymore (or something
> >with similar effect), start some kernel thread that does the actual
> >"wipe" and "unref/unmap" from the tree and all that stuff "in the
> >background", using much finer granular temporary locking for each
> >processed region.
> >
> >If that then takes 20 minutes, someone may still care, but at least it
> >does not block IO to the other active devices in the pool.
> >
> >Or is something like this already going on?
> >

Nothing is going on yet but I'll work with Joe on how to skin this cat.

> Hi
> 
> Please always specify kernel in-use.
> Eventually retry with last officially released one (e.g. 4.4)
> There were number of improvements in speed of discard.
> 
> Also - you may try to use thin-pool with '--discards  nopassdown'
> (or even ignore) in case TRIM is very limiting factor
> (with impacting free space in thin-pool for 'ignore' one)

discard isn't the same as device delete.  I guess you're proposing
discarding the thin device with something like blkdiscard before
deleting the device (like someone else in this thread has already tired,
though not clear they were using the latest thinp discard advances).

In any case, these hacks are unfortunate and I'm going to make fixing
this coarse-grained locking a priority.

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Joe Thornber]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 02:38:28PM +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
> even ~20 minutes before.

I did some work on speeding up thin removal in autumn '14, in
particular agressively prefetching metadata pages sped up the tree
traversal hugely.  Could you confirm you're seeing pauses of this
duration with currently kernels please?

Obviously any pause, even a few seconds is unacceptable.  Having a
background kernel worker thread doing the delete, as you describe, is
the way to go.  But there are complications to do with
transactionality and crash protection that have prevented me
implementing it.  I'll think on it some more now I know it's such a
problem for you.

- Joe

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Dennis Yang]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2721 bytes --]

Hi,

I had done some experiments with kernel 4.2.8 that I am using for
production right now and kernel 4.4 with commit 3d5f6733 ("dm thin
metadata: speed up discard of partially mapped volumes") for comparison.

All the experiments below are performed with a dm-thin pool (512KB block
size) which is built with a RAID 0 composed by two Intel 480GB SSDs as
metadata device and a zero-target DM device as the data device. The machine
is equipped with an Intel E3-1246 v3 CPU and 16GB ram.

To discard all the mappings of a fully-mapped 10TB thin device with 512KB
block size,
kernel 4.4 takes 6m57s
kernel 4.2.8 takes 6m49s

To delete a fully-mapped 10TB thin device,
kernel 4.4 takes 48s
kernel 4.2.8 takes 47s

In another experiment, I create an empty thin device and a fully-mapped
10TB thin device. Then, I start writing to the empty thin device
sequentially with fio before deleting the fully-mapped thin device. It can
be observed that the write requests get blocked for couple of seconds
(47~48sec) until the deletion process finishes on both kernel 4.2.8 and
kernel 4.4. If we discard all the mappings in parallel with fio instead of
deleting the fully-mapped thin device, write requests will still be blocked
until all discard requests finished. I think this is because that pool's
deferred list is full of all those discard requests and thus having no
spare computation resource for new write requests to the other thin device.
The kworker thread of thinp cause 100% CPU utilisation while processing the
discard requests.

Hope this information helps.

Thanks,
Dennis


2016-01-23 0:43 GMT+08:00 Joe Thornber <thornber@redhat.com>:

> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 02:38:28PM +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> > We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
> > even ~20 minutes before.
>
> I did some work on speeding up thin removal in autumn '14, in
> particular agressively prefetching metadata pages sped up the tree
> traversal hugely.  Could you confirm you're seeing pauses of this
> duration with currently kernels please?
>
> Obviously any pause, even a few seconds is unacceptable.  Having a
> background kernel worker thread doing the delete, as you describe, is
> the way to go.  But there are complications to do with
> transactionality and crash protection that have prevented me
> implementing it.  I'll think on it some more now I know it's such a
> problem for you.
>
> - Joe
>
> --
> dm-devel mailing list
> dm-devel@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
>



-- 
Dennis Yang
QNAP Systems, Inc.
Skype: qnap.dennis.yang
Email: dennisyang@qnap.com
Tel: (+886)-2-2393-5152 ext. 15018
Address: 13F., No.56, Sec. 1, Xinsheng S. Rd., Zhongzheng Dist., Taipei
City, Taiwan

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Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Joe Thornber]

Hi Dennis,

This is indeed useful.  Is there any chance you could re-run your test
with this patch applied please?

https://github.com/jthornber/linux-2.6/commit/64197a3802320c7a7359ff4a3e592e2bc5bb73dc

- Joe

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Dennis Yang]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1989 bytes --]

Hi Joe,

I have applied this patch to kernel 4.4 and get the following result.

To delete a fully-mapped 10TB thin devices,
with this patch takes 48 sec.
without this patch takes 48 sec.

To read an empty thin device while deleting a fully-mapped 10TB thin
devices,
with this patch I/O throughput drops from 4.6TB/s to 4.3TB/s
without this patch, I/O blocks.

To write an empty thin device while deleting a fully-mapped 10TB thin
devices,
with this patch I/O throughput drops from 3.2TB/s to below 4MB/s
without this patch, I/O blocks

Since it looks like the write performance still suffer from the lock
contention, I make it to sleep 100 msec between lock release and reacquire
in commit_decs().

To write an empty thin device while deleting a fully-mapped 10TB thin
devices
With sleep in commit_decs(), I/O throughput drops from 3.2TB/s to 2.2TB/s,
but the deletion time grows from 48sec to 2m54sec.

The one thing I am curious about is what data structures are dm-thin tries
to protect by holding the pool lock during all those btree operations. At
first, I think the lock is held to protect the btree itself. But based on
the comments in the source code, I believe that it has already been
protected by the read/writes lock in transaction manager
(dm_tm_read/write_lock). Does this mean that the pool lock is held only to
protect the reference count bitmap/btree?

Thanks,
Dennis

2016-01-27 0:19 GMT+08:00 Joe Thornber <thornber@redhat.com>:

> Hi Dennis,
>
> This is indeed useful.  Is there any chance you could re-run your test
> with this patch applied please?
>
>
> https://github.com/jthornber/linux-2.6/commit/64197a3802320c7a7359ff4a3e592e2bc5bb73dc
>
> - Joe
>
> --
> dm-devel mailing list
> dm-devel@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
>



-- 
Dennis Yang
QNAP Systems, Inc.
Skype: qnap.dennis.yang
Email: dennisyang@qnap.com
Tel: (+886)-2-2393-5152 ext. 15018
Address: 13F., No.56, Sec. 1, Xinsheng S. Rd., Zhongzheng Dist., Taipei
City, Taiwan

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Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Joe Thornber]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 12:51:09PM +0800, Dennis Yang wrote:
> Hi Joe,
> 
> I have applied this patch to kernel 4.4 and get the following result.

Thanks for taking the time to do this.

> To delete a fully-mapped 10TB thin devices,
> with this patch takes 48 sec.
> without this patch takes 48 sec.
> 
> To read an empty thin device while deleting a fully-mapped 10TB thin
> devices,
> with this patch I/O throughput drops from 4.6TB/s to 4.3TB/s
> without this patch, I/O blocks.
> 
> To write an empty thin device while deleting a fully-mapped 10TB thin
> devices,
> with this patch I/O throughput drops from 3.2TB/s to below 4MB/s
> without this patch, I/O blocks
> 
> Since it looks like the write performance still suffer from the lock
> contention, I make it to sleep 100 msec between lock release and reacquire
> in commit_decs().

Well it's really provisioning or breaking of sharing that's slow, not
writes in general.  Rather than adding a sleep it would be worth
playing with the MAX_DECS #define.  eg, try 16 and 8192 and see how
that effects the throughput.

> The one thing I am curious about is what data structures are dm-thin tries
> to protect by holding the pool lock during all those btree operations. At
> first, I think the lock is held to protect the btree itself. But based on
> the comments in the source code, I believe that it has already been
> protected by the read/writes lock in transaction manager
> (dm_tm_read/write_lock). Does this mean that the pool lock is held only to
> protect the reference count bitmap/btree?

You're correct.  I wrote all of persistent data using a rolling lock
scheme that allows updates to the btrees to occur in parallel.  But I
didn't extend this to cover the superblock or in core version of the
superblock.  So the top level rw semaphore is protecting this in core
sb.  I've spent a couple of days this week experimenting with
switching over to using the rolling lock scheme properly.  The changes
are extensive:

    - Strip out the root_lock rw_sem.

    - Introduce a transaction_lock.

      Every metadata op needs to hold a rw sem in 'read' mode (even if
      it's doing an update), except commit which would hold in write
      mode, this forces all the threads to synchronise whenever we
      commit.

    - Change the block manager to allow us to 'lock' abstract things,
      like the in core sb.  This is really just introducing another
      namespace to the bm.  Pretty easy.

    - Change the interfaces to persistent data structures like btree,
      array etc. to take one of these locks representing the
      superblock.  Audit to make sure this lock is released early to
      support the rolling lock scheme.

    - Add locking/protection to the space maps (which have some in
      core data structs).

Given this long list of changes I don't think it's worth the risk.  So
I'd rather use the patch I posted earlier.

- Joe

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Dennis Yang]

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Hi,

2016-01-28 18:44 GMT+08:00 Joe Thornber <thornber@redhat.com>:

> On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 12:51:09PM +0800, Dennis Yang wrote:
> > Hi Joe,
> >
> > I have applied this patch to kernel 4.4 and get the following result.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to do this.
>
> > To delete a fully-mapped 10TB thin devices,
> > with this patch takes 48 sec.
> > without this patch takes 48 sec.
> >
> > To read an empty thin device while deleting a fully-mapped 10TB thin
> > devices,
> > with this patch I/O throughput drops from 4.6TB/s to 4.3TB/s
> > without this patch, I/O blocks.
> >
> > To write an empty thin device while deleting a fully-mapped 10TB thin
> > devices,
> > with this patch I/O throughput drops from 3.2TB/s to below 4MB/s
> > without this patch, I/O blocks
> >
> > Since it looks like the write performance still suffer from the lock
> > contention, I make it to sleep 100 msec between lock release and
> reacquire
> > in commit_decs().
>
> Well it's really provisioning or breaking of sharing that's slow, not
> writes in general.  Rather than adding a sleep it would be worth
> playing with the MAX_DECS #define.  eg, try 16 and 8192 and see how
> that effects the throughput.


>

I had tried to define MAX_DECS as 1, 16, and 8192, and here is the
throughput I got.
When #define MAX_DECS 1, throughput drops from 3.2GB/s to around 800 ~ 950
MB/s.
When #define MAX_DECS 16, throughput drops from 3.2GB/s to around 150 ~ 400
MB/s
When #define MAX_DECS 8192, the I/O blocks until deletion is done.

These throughput is gathered by writing to a newly created thin device
which means lots of provisioning take place. So it seems that the more fine
grained lock we use here results in the higher throughput. Is there any
concern if I set MAX_DECS to 1 for production?

Thanks for your help again.

Dennis


> > The one thing I am curious about is what data structures are dm-thin
> tries
> > to protect by holding the pool lock during all those btree operations. At
> > first, I think the lock is held to protect the btree itself. But based on
> > the comments in the source code, I believe that it has already been
> > protected by the read/writes lock in transaction manager
> > (dm_tm_read/write_lock). Does this mean that the pool lock is held only
> to
> > protect the reference count bitmap/btree?
>
> You're correct.  I wrote all of persistent data using a rolling lock
> scheme that allows updates to the btrees to occur in parallel.  But I
> didn't extend this to cover the superblock or in core version of the
> superblock.  So the top level rw semaphore is protecting this in core
> sb.  I've spent a couple of days this week experimenting with
> switching over to using the rolling lock scheme properly.  The changes
> are extensive:
>
>     - Strip out the root_lock rw_sem.
>
>     - Introduce a transaction_lock.
>
>       Every metadata op needs to hold a rw sem in 'read' mode (even if
>       it's doing an update), except commit which would hold in write
>       mode, this forces all the threads to synchronise whenever we
>       commit.
>
>     - Change the block manager to allow us to 'lock' abstract things,
>       like the in core sb.  This is really just introducing another
>       namespace to the bm.  Pretty easy.
>
>     - Change the interfaces to persistent data structures like btree,
>       array etc. to take one of these locks representing the
>       superblock.  Audit to make sure this lock is released early to
>       support the rolling lock scheme.
>
>     - Add locking/protection to the space maps (which have some in
>       core data structs).
>
> Given this long list of changes I don't think it's worth the risk.  So
> I'd rather use the patch I posted earlier.
>
> - Joe
>
> --
> dm-devel mailing list
> dm-devel@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
>



-- 
Dennis Yang
QNAP Systems, Inc.
Skype: qnap.dennis.yang
Email: dennisyang@qnap.com
Tel: (+886)-2-2393-5152 ext. 15018
Address: 13F., No.56, Sec. 1, Xinsheng S. Rd., Zhongzheng Dist., Taipei
City, Taiwan

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Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Lars Ellenberg]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 04:43:46PM +0000, Joe Thornber wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 02:38:28PM +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> > We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
> > even ~20 minutes before.
> 
> I did some work on speeding up thin removal in autumn '14, in
> particular agressively prefetching metadata pages sped up the tree
> traversal hugely.  Could you confirm you're seeing pauses of this
> duration with currently kernels please?

There is 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=990583
Bug 990583 - lvremove of thin snapshots takes 5 to 20 minutes (single
core cpu bound?) 

From August 2013, closed by you in October 2015,
as "not a bug", also pointing to meta data prefetch.

Now, you tell me, how prefetching meta data (doing disk IO
more efficiently) helps with something that is clearly CPU bound
(eating 100% single core CPU traversing whatever)...

Reason I mention this bug again here is:
there should be a lvm thin meta data dump in there,
which you could use for benchmarking improvements yourself.

> Obviously any pause, even a few seconds is unacceptable.  Having a
> background kernel worker thread doing the delete, as you describe, is
> the way to go.  But there are complications to do with
> transactionality and crash protection that have prevented me
> implementing it.  I'll think on it some more now I know it's such a
> problem for you.
> 
> - Joe

Thanks,

    Lars

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Joe Thornber]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 03:50:31PM +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 04:43:46PM +0000, Joe Thornber wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 02:38:28PM +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> > > We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
> > > even ~20 minutes before.
> > 
> > I did some work on speeding up thin removal in autumn '14, in
> > particular agressively prefetching metadata pages sped up the tree
> > traversal hugely.  Could you confirm you're seeing pauses of this
> > duration with currently kernels please?
> 
> There is 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=990583
> Bug 990583 - lvremove of thin snapshots takes 5 to 20 minutes (single
> core cpu bound?) 
> 
> >From August 2013, closed by you in October 2015,
> as "not a bug", also pointing to meta data prefetch.
> 
> Now, you tell me, how prefetching meta data (doing disk IO
> more efficiently) helps with something that is clearly CPU bound
> (eating 100% single core CPU traversing whatever)...
> 
> Reason I mention this bug again here is:
> there should be a lvm thin meta data dump in there,
> which you could use for benchmarking improvements yourself.

There is no metadata dump attached to that bug.  I do benchmark stuff
myself, and I found prefetching to make a big difference (obviously
I'm not cpu bound like you).  We all have different hardware, which is
why I ask people with more real world scenarios to test stuff separately.

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Joe Thornber]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 07:01:44PM +0800, Dennis Yang wrote:
> I had tried to define MAX_DECS as 1, 16, and 8192, and here is the
> throughput I got.
> When #define MAX_DECS 1, throughput drops from 3.2GB/s to around 800 ~ 950
> MB/s.
> When #define MAX_DECS 16, throughput drops from 3.2GB/s to around 150 ~ 400
> MB/s
> When #define MAX_DECS 8192, the I/O blocks until deletion is done.
> 
> These throughput is gathered by writing to a newly created thin device
> which means lots of provisioning take place. So it seems that the more fine
> grained lock we use here results in the higher throughput. Is there any
> concern if I set MAX_DECS to 1 for production?

Does the time taken to remove the thin device change as you drop it to one?

- Joe

Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Dennis Yang]

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Hi,

2016-01-30 0:05 GMT+08:00 Joe Thornber <thornber@redhat.com>:

> On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 07:01:44PM +0800, Dennis Yang wrote:
> > I had tried to define MAX_DECS as 1, 16, and 8192, and here is the
> > throughput I got.
> > When #define MAX_DECS 1, throughput drops from 3.2GB/s to around 800 ~
> 950
> > MB/s.
> > When #define MAX_DECS 16, throughput drops from 3.2GB/s to around 150 ~
> 400
> > MB/s
> > When #define MAX_DECS 8192, the I/O blocks until deletion is done.
> >
> > These throughput is gathered by writing to a newly created thin device
> > which means lots of provisioning take place. So it seems that the more
> fine
> > grained lock we use here results in the higher throughput. Is there any
> > concern if I set MAX_DECS to 1 for production?
>
> Does the time taken to remove the thin device change as you drop it to one?
>
> - Joe
>

Not that I am aware of, but I redo the experiment and the results are
listed below.

#define MAX_DECS 1
Delete a fully-mapped 10TB device without concurrent I/O takes 49 secs.
Delete a fully-mapped 10TB device with concurrent I/O to pool takes 44 secs.

#define MAX_DECS 16
Delete a fully-mapped 10TB device without concurrent I/O takes 47 secs.
Delete a fully-mapped 10TB device with concurrent I/O to pool takes 46 secs.

#define MAX_DECS 8192
Delete a fully-mapped 10TB device without concurrent I/O takes 47 secs.
Delete a fully-mapped 10TB device with concurrent I/O to pool takes 50 secs.

Thanks,
Dennis

-- 
Dennis Yang
QNAP Systems, Inc.
Skype: qnap.dennis.yang
Email: dennisyang@qnap.com
Tel: (+886)-2-2393-5152 ext. 15018
Address: 13F., No.56, Sec. 1, Xinsheng S. Rd., Zhongzheng Dist., Taipei
City, Taiwan

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Re: I/O block when removing thin device on the same pool

[Lars Ellenberg]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 04:04:21PM +0000, Joe Thornber wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 03:50:31PM +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 04:43:46PM +0000, Joe Thornber wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 02:38:28PM +0100, Lars Ellenberg wrote:
> > > > We have seen lvremove of thin snapshots sometimes minutes,
> > > > even ~20 minutes before.
> > > 
> > > I did some work on speeding up thin removal in autumn '14, in
> > > particular agressively prefetching metadata pages sped up the tree
> > > traversal hugely.  Could you confirm you're seeing pauses of this
> > > duration with currently kernels please?
> > 
> > There is 
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=990583
> > Bug 990583 - lvremove of thin snapshots takes 5 to 20 minutes (single
> > core cpu bound?) 
> > 
> > >From August 2013, closed by you in October 2015,
> > as "not a bug", also pointing to meta data prefetch.
> > 
> > Now, you tell me, how prefetching meta data (doing disk IO
> > more efficiently) helps with something that is clearly CPU bound
> > (eating 100% single core CPU traversing whatever)...
> > 
> > Reason I mention this bug again here is:
> > there should be a lvm thin meta data dump in there,
> > which you could use for benchmarking improvements yourself.
> 
> There is no metadata dump attached to that bug.

Hm. Then we must have communicated via side channels
(irc, uploads) back then, I'm pretty sure we uploaded it somewhere.

> I do benchmark stuff
> myself, and I found prefetching to make a big difference (obviously
> I'm not cpu bound like you).  We all have different hardware, which is
> why I ask people with more real world scenarios to test stuff separately.


Thank you for suggestions (and re-opening that bug).
I'll have someone follow up in the bugzilla,
as soon as we have something to report.

I just checked, we still have some similar setups running regularly, and
according to log files of the one system I looked at, apparently snapshot
removals are typically between 2.5 and 4 minutes now, when they used to be 15
to 20 minutes most of the time.

But on first glance, I can see no correlation between kernel upgrades or other
changes and reduced removal times, so this may simply be a change of access
pattern on the origin :-/

I still can get you meta dumps, if you are interested,
or maybe have the guys try some things.

I would be communicating via a number of hops,
so no "direct access lab setup" right now.

Let me know what data you would be interested in most,
and I'll try to "make it happen", and relay it to you.

Cheers,

   Lars