Re: CFQ idling kills I/O performance on ext4 with blkio cgroup controller

From: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
To: "Srivatsa S. Bhat" <srivatsa@csail.mit.edu>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>, Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>,
	linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-block <linux-block@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, cgroups@vger.kernel.org,
	kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>, Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>,
	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>,
	amakhalov@vmware.com, anishs@vmware.com, srivatsab@vmware.com,
	Ulf Hansson <ulf.hansson@linaro.org>,
	Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	Stable <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: CFQ idling kills I/O performance on ext4 with blkio cgroup controller
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2019 10:20:53 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190613082053.GD26505@quack2.suse.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <dd32ed59-a543-fc76-9a9a-2462f0119270@csail.mit.edu>

On Wed 12-06-19 12:36:53, Srivatsa S. Bhat wrote:
> 
> [ Adding Greg to CC ]
> 
> On 6/12/19 6:04 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Tue 11-06-19 15:34:48, Srivatsa S. Bhat wrote:
> >> On 6/2/19 12:04 AM, Srivatsa S. Bhat wrote:
> >>> On 5/30/19 3:45 AM, Paolo Valente wrote:
> >>>>
> >> [...]
> >>>> At any rate, since you pointed out that you are interested in
> >>>> out-of-the-box performance, let me complete the context: in case
> >>>> low_latency is left set, one gets, in return for this 12% loss,
> >>>> a) at least 1000% higher responsiveness, e.g., 1000% lower start-up
> >>>> times of applications under load [1];
> >>>> b) 500-1000% higher throughput in multi-client server workloads, as I
> >>>> already pointed out [2].
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> I'm very happy that you could solve the problem without having to
> >>> compromise on any of the performance characteristics/features of BFQ!
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> I'm going to prepare complete patches.  In addition, if ok for you,
> >>>> I'll report these results on the bug you created.  Then I guess we can
> >>>> close it.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> Sounds great!
> >>>
> >>
> >> Hi Paolo,
> >>
> >> Hope you are doing great!
> >>
> >> I was wondering if you got a chance to post these patches to LKML for
> >> review and inclusion... (No hurry, of course!)
> >>
> >> Also, since your fixes address the performance issues in BFQ, do you
> >> have any thoughts on whether they can be adapted to CFQ as well, to
> >> benefit the older stable kernels that still support CFQ?
> > 
> > Since CFQ doesn't exist in current upstream kernel anymore, I seriously
> > doubt you'll be able to get any performance improvements for it in the
> > stable kernels...
> > 
> 
> I suspected as much, but that seems unfortunate though. The latest LTS
> kernel is based on 4.19, which still supports CFQ. It would have been
> great to have a process to address significant issues on older
> kernels too.

Well, you could still tune the performance difference by changing
slice_idle and group_idle tunables for CFQ (in
/sys/block/<device>/queue/iosched/).  Changing these to lower values will
reduce the throughput loss when switching between cgroups at the cost of
lower accuracy of enforcing configured IO proportions among cgroups.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
SUSE Labs, CR