Re: [PATCH V3 00/11] block-throttle: add .high limit

[Paolo Valente]

> Il giorno 05 ott 2016, alle ore 21:08, Shaohua Li <shli@xxxxxx> ha scritto:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 05, 2016 at 11:30:53AM -0700, Shaohua Li wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 05, 2016 at 10:49:46AM -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
>>> Hello, Paolo.
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Oct 05, 2016 at 02:37:00PM +0200, Paolo Valente wrote:
>>>> In this respect, for your generic, unpredictable scenario to make
>>>> sense, there must exist at least one real system that meets the
>>>> requirements of such a scenario.  Or, if such a real system does not
>>>> yet exist, it must be possible to emulate it.  If it is impossible to
>>>> achieve this last goal either, then I miss the usefulness
>>>> of looking for solutions for such a scenario.
>>>> 
>>>> That said, let's define the instance(s) of the scenario that you find
>>>> most representative, and let's test BFQ on it/them.  Numbers will give
>>>> us the answers.  For example, what about all or part of the following
>>>> groups:
>>>> . one cyclically doing random I/O for some second and then sequential I/O
>>>> for the next seconds
>>>> . one doing, say, quasi-sequential I/O in ON/OFF cycles
>>>> . one starting an application cyclically
>>>> . one playing back or streaming a movie
>>>> 
>>>> For each group, we could then measure the time needed to complete each
>>>> phase of I/O in each cycle, plus the responsiveness in the group
>>>> starting an application, plus the frame drop in the group streaming
>>>> the movie.  In addition, we can measure the bandwidth/iops enjoyed by
>>>> each group, plus, of course, the aggregate throughput of the whole
>>>> system.  In particular we could compare results with throttling, BFQ,
>>>> and CFQ.
>>>> 
>>>> Then we could write resulting numbers on the stone, and stick to them
>>>> until something proves them wrong.
>>>> 
>>>> What do you (or others) think about it?
>>> 
>>> That sounds great and yeah it's lame that we didn't start with that.
>>> Shaohua, would it be difficult to compare how bfq performs against
>>> blk-throttle?
>> 
>> I had a test of BFQ. I'm using BFQ found at
>> http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/sources.php. version is
>> 4.7.0-v8r3. It's a LSI SSD, queue depth 32. I use default setting. fio script
>> is:
>> 
>> [global]
>> ioengine=libaio
>> direct=1
>> readwrite=randread
>> bs=4k
>> runtime=60
>> time_based=1
>> file_service_type=random:36
>> overwrite=1
>> thread=0
>> group_reporting=1
>> filename=/dev/sdb
>> iodepth=1
>> numjobs=8
>> 
>> [groupA]
>> prio=2
>> 
>> [groupB]
>> new_group
>> prio=6
>> 
>> I'll change iodepth, numjobs and prio in different tests. result unit is MB/s.
>> 
>> iodepth=1 numjobs=1 prio 4:4
>> CFQ: 28:28 BFQ: 21:21 deadline: 29:29
>> 
>> iodepth=8 numjobs=1 prio 4:4
>> CFQ: 162:162 BFQ: 102:98 deadline: 205:205
>> 
>> iodepth=1 numjobs=8 prio 4:4
>> CFQ: 157:157 BFQ: 81:92 deadline: 196:197
>> 
>> iodepth=1 numjobs=1 prio 2:6
>> CFQ: 26.7:27.6 BFQ: 20:6 deadline: 29:29
>> 
>> iodepth=8 numjobs=1 prio 2:6
>> CFQ: 166:174 BFQ: 139:72  deadline: 202:202
>> 
>> iodepth=1 numjobs=8 prio 2:6
>> CFQ: 148:150 BFQ: 90:77 deadline: 198:197
> 
> More tests:
> 
> iodepth=8 numjobs=1 prio 2:6, group A has 50M/s limit
> CFQ:51:207  BFQ: 51:45  deadline: 51:216
> 
> iodepth=1 numjobs=1 prio 2:6, group A bs=4k, group B bs=64k
> CFQ:25:249  BFQ: 23:42  deadline: 26:251
> 

A true proportional share scheduler like BFQ works under the
assumption to be the only limiter of the bandwidth of its clients.
And the availability of such a scheduler should apparently make
bandwidth limiting useless: once you have a mechanism that allows you
to give each group the desired fraction of the bandwidth, and to
redistribute excess bandwidth seamlessly when needed, what do you need
additional limiting for?

But I'm not expert of any possible system configuration or
requirement.  So, if you have practical examples, I would really
appreciate them.  And I don't think it will be difficult to see what
goes wrong in BFQ with external bw limitation, and to fix the
problem.

Thanks,
Paolo

> Thanks,
> Shaohua
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--
Paolo Valente
Algogroup
Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche, Informatiche e Matematiche
Via Campi 213/B
41125 Modena - Italy
http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/