Re: [PATCH 2/2] block: loop: avoiding too many pending per work I/O

[Ming Lei]

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 9:59 PM, Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 07:49:55PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> ...
>> diff --git a/drivers/block/loop.c b/drivers/block/loop.c
>> index 3dc1598..1bee523 100644
>> --- a/drivers/block/loop.c
>> +++ b/drivers/block/loop.c
>> @@ -725,7 +725,7 @@ static int loop_set_fd(struct loop_device *lo, fmode_t mode,
>>               goto out_putf;
>>       error = -ENOMEM;
>>       lo->wq = alloc_workqueue("kloopd%d",
>> -                     WQ_MEM_RECLAIM | WQ_HIGHPRI | WQ_UNBOUND, 0,
>> +                     WQ_MEM_RECLAIM | WQ_HIGHPRI | WQ_UNBOUND, 16,
>
> It's a bit weird to hard code this to 16 as this effectively becomes a
> hidden bottleneck for concurrency.  For cases where 16 isn't a good
> value, hunting down what's going on can be painful as it's not visible
> anywhere.  I still think the right knob to control concurrency is
> nr_requests for the loop device.  You said that for linear IOs, it's
> better to have higher nr_requests than concurrency but can you
> elaborate why?

I mean, in case of sequential IO, the IO may hit page cache a bit easier,
so handling the IO may be quite quick, then it is often more efficient to
handle them in one same context(such as, handle one by one from IO
queue) than from different contexts(scheduled from different worker
threads). And that can be made by setting a bigger nr_requests(queue_depth).

Thanks,
Ming Lei
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