From: Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@linux.dev>
To: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
Daniel Gomez <da.gomez@samsung.com>,
Pankaj Raghav <p.raghav@samsung.com>,
Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>, Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>,
Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>, Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>,
Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Measuring limits and enhancing buffered IO
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:24:55 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <45odvhgymm7fxsgwpewoiiggaokxjcr7ootsamm4rwsdw26j62@5lohhv2kvofo> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Zdkxfspq3urnrM6I@bombadil.infradead.org>
On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 03:59:58PM -0800, Luis Chamberlain wrote:
> Part of the testing we have done with LBS was to do some performance
> tests on XFS to ensure things are not regressing. Building linux is a
> fine decent test and we did some random cloud instance tests on that and
> presented that at Plumbers, but it doesn't really cut it if we want to
> push things to the limit though. What are the limits to buffered IO
> and how do we test that? Who keeps track of it?
>
> The obvious recurring tension is that for really high performance folks
> just recommend to use birect IO. But if you are stress testing changes
> to a filesystem and want to push buffered IO to its limits it makes
> sense to stick to buffered IO, otherwise how else do we test it?
>
> It is good to know limits to buffered IO too because some workloads
> cannot use direct IO. For instance PostgreSQL doesn't have direct IO
> support and even as late as the end of last year we learned that adding
> direct IO to PostgreSQL would be difficult. Chris Mason has noted also
> that direct IO can also force writes during reads (?)... Anyway, testing
> the limits of buffered IO limits to ensure you are not creating
> regressions when doing some page cache surgery seems like it might be
> useful and a sensible thing to do .... The good news is we have not found
> regressions with LBS but all the testing seems to beg the question, of what
> are the limits of buffered IO anyway, and how does it scale? Do we know, do
> we care? Do we keep track of it? How does it compare to direct IO for some
> workloads? How big is the delta? How do we best test that? How do we
> automate all that? Do we want to automatically test this to avoid regressions?
>
> The obvious issues with some workloads for buffered IO is having a
> possible penality if you are not really re-using folios added to the
> page cache. Jens Axboe reported a while ago issues with workloads with
> random reads over a data set 10x the size of RAM and also proposed
> RWF_UNCACHED as a way to help [0]. As Chinner put it, this seemed more
> like direct IO with kernel pages and a memcpy(), and it requires
> further serialization to be implemented that we already do for
> direct IO for writes. There at least seems to be agreement that if we're
> going to provide an enhancement or alternative that we should strive to not
> make the same mistakes we've done with direct IO. The rationale for some
> workloads to use buffered IO is it helps reduce some tail latencies, so
> that's something to live up to.
>
> On that same thread Christoph also mentioned the possibility of a direct
> IO variant which can leverage the cache. Is that something we want to
> move forward with?
The thing to consider here would be an improved O_SYNC. There's a fair
amount of tree walking and thread to thread cacheline bouncing that
would be avoided by just calling .write_folios() and kicking bios off
from .write_iter().
OTOH - the way it's done now is probably the best possible way of
splitting up the work between multiple threads, so I'd expect this
approach to get less throughput than current O_SYNC.
Luis, are you profiling these workloads? I haven't looked at high
throughput profiles of the buffered IO path in years, and that's a good
place to start.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-02-25 5:25 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 87+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-02-23 23:59 [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] Measuring limits and enhancing buffered IO Luis Chamberlain
2024-02-24 4:12 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-24 17:31 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-24 18:13 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-24 18:24 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-24 18:20 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-24 19:11 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-24 21:42 ` Theodore Ts'o
2024-02-24 22:57 ` Chris Mason
2024-02-24 23:40 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-05-10 23:57 ` Luis Chamberlain
2024-02-25 5:18 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-25 6:04 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-25 13:10 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-25 17:03 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-25 21:14 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-25 23:45 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-26 1:02 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-26 1:32 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-26 1:58 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-26 2:06 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-26 2:34 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-26 2:50 ` Al Viro
2024-02-26 17:17 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-26 21:07 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-26 21:17 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-26 21:19 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-26 21:55 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-26 23:29 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 0:05 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-27 0:29 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 0:55 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-27 1:08 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 5:17 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-27 6:21 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 15:32 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-27 15:52 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 16:06 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-27 15:54 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-27 16:21 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-27 16:34 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 17:58 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-28 23:55 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-29 19:42 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-29 20:51 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-03-05 2:19 ` Paul E. McKenney
2024-02-27 0:43 ` Dave Chinner
2024-02-26 22:46 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-26 23:48 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-27 7:21 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 15:39 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-27 15:54 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 16:34 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-27 16:47 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 17:07 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-27 17:20 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 18:02 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-05-14 11:52 ` Luis Chamberlain
2024-05-14 16:04 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-25 21:29 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-25 17:32 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-24 17:55 ` Luis Chamberlain
2024-02-25 5:24 ` Kent Overstreet [this message]
2024-02-26 12:22 ` Dave Chinner
2024-02-27 10:07 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 14:08 ` Luis Chamberlain
2024-02-27 14:57 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 22:13 ` Dave Chinner
2024-02-27 22:21 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-27 22:42 ` Dave Chinner
2024-02-28 7:48 ` [Lsf-pc] " Amir Goldstein
2024-02-28 14:01 ` Chris Mason
2024-02-29 0:25 ` Dave Chinner
2024-02-29 0:57 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-03-04 0:46 ` Dave Chinner
2024-02-27 22:46 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-27 23:00 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-28 2:22 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-28 3:00 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-28 4:22 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-28 17:34 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-28 18:04 ` Matthew Wilcox
2024-02-28 18:18 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-28 19:09 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-28 19:29 ` Kent Overstreet
2024-02-28 20:17 ` Linus Torvalds
2024-02-28 23:21 ` Kent Overstreet
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=45odvhgymm7fxsgwpewoiiggaokxjcr7ootsamm4rwsdw26j62@5lohhv2kvofo \
--to=kent.overstreet@linux.dev \
--cc=axboe@kernel.dk \
--cc=clm@fb.com \
--cc=da.gomez@samsung.com \
--cc=david@fromorbit.com \
--cc=hannes@cmpxchg.org \
--cc=hch@lst.de \
--cc=linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=linux-mm@kvack.org \
--cc=lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org \
--cc=mcgrof@kernel.org \
--cc=p.raghav@samsung.com \
--cc=torvalds@linux-foundation.org \
--cc=willy@infradead.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).