Re: [PATCH 4/8] io_uring/io-wq: cache work->flags in variable

[Pavel Begunkov]

On 1/30/25 14:57, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 1/29/25 10:36 PM, Max Kellermann wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 12:41?AM Pavel Begunkov <asml.silence@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Ok, then it's an architectural problem and needs more serious
> > > reengineering, e.g. of how work items are stored and grabbed
> >
> > Rough unpolished idea: I was thinking about having multiple work
> > lists, each with its own spinlock (separate cache line), and each
> > io-wq thread only uses one of them, while the submitter round-robins
> > through the lists.
>
> Pending work would certainly need better spreading than just the two
> classes we have now.
>
> One thing to keep in mind is that the design of io-wq is such that it's
> quite possible to have N work items pending and just a single thread
> serving all of them. If the io-wq thread doesn't go to sleep, it will
> keep processing work units. This is done for efficiency reasons, and to

Looking at people complaining about too many iowq tasks, we should be
limiting the number of them even more aggressively, and maybe scaling
them down faster if that's a problem.

> avoid a proliferation of io-wq threads when it's not going to be
> beneficial. This means than when you queue a work item, it's not easy to
> pick an appropriate io-wq thread upfront, and generally the io-wq thread
> itself will pick its next work item at the perfect time - when it
> doesn't have anything else to do, or finished the existing work.
>
> This should be kept in mind for making io-wq scale better.

People are saying that work stealing is working well with thread
pools, that might be an option, even though there are some
differences from userspace thread pools. I also remember Hao was
trying to do something for iowq a couple of years ago.

--
Pavel Begunkov