Re: [PATCH] [RFC] xfs: wire up aio_fsync method

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 07:24:10PM -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:

On 2014-06-17 17:28, Dave Chinner wrote:

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[cc linux-mm]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 07:23:58AM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:

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On 2014-06-16 16:27, Dave Chinner wrote:

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On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 01:30:42PM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:

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On 06/16/2014 01:19 AM, Dave Chinner wrote:

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On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 08:58:46PM -0600, Jens Axboe wrote:

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On 2014-06-15 20:00, Dave Chinner wrote:

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On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 08:33:23AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
FWIW, the non-linear system CPU overhead of a fs_mark test I've been
running isn't anything related to XFS.  The async fsync workqueue
results in several thousand worker threads dispatching IO
concurrently across 16 CPUs:

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I know that the tag allocator has been rewritten, so I tested
against a current a current Linus kernel with the XFS aio-fsync
patch. The results are all over the place - from several sequential
runs of the same test (removing the files in between so each tests
starts from an empty fs):

Wall time	sys time	IOPS	 files/s
4m58.151s	11m12.648s	30,000	 13,500
4m35.075s	12m45.900s	45,000	 15,000
3m10.665s	11m15.804s	65,000	 21,000
3m27.384s	11m54.723s	85,000	 20,000
3m59.574s	11m12.012s	50,000	 16,500
4m12.704s	12m15.720s	50,000	 17,000

The 3.15 based kernel was pretty consistent around the 4m10 mark,
generally only +/-10s in runtime and not much change in system time.
The files/s rate reported by fs_mark doesn't vary that much, either.
So the new tag allocator seems to be no better in terms of IO
dispatch scalability, yet adds significant variability to IO
performance.

What I noticed is a massive jump in context switch overhead: from
around 250,000/s to over 800,000/s and the CPU profiles show that
this comes from the new tag allocator:

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Can you try with this patch?

Ok, context switches are back down in the realm of 400,000/s. It's
better, but it's still a bit higher than that the 3.15 code. XFS is
actually showing up in the context switch path profiles now...

However, performance is still excitingly variable and not much
different to not having this patch applied. System time is unchanged
(still around the 11m20s +/- 1m) and IOPS, wall time and files/s all
show significant variance (at least +/-25%) from run to run. The
worst case is not as slow as the unpatched kernel, but it's no
better than the 3.15 worst case.

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Looks like the main contention problem is in blk_sq_make_request().
Also, there looks to be quite a bit of lock contention on the tag
wait queues given that this patch made prepare_to_wait_exclusive()
suddenly show up in the profiles.

FWIW, on a fast run there is very little time in
blk_sq_make_request() lock contention, and overall spin lock/unlock
overhead of these two functions is around 10% each....

So, yes, the patch reduces context switches but doesn't really
reduce system time, improve performance noticably or address the
run-to-run variability issue...

OK, so one more thing to try. With the same patch still applied,
could you edit block/blk-mq-tag.h and change

        BT_WAIT_QUEUES  = 8,

to

        BT_WAIT_QUEUES  = 1,

and see if that smoothes things out?

Ok, that smoothes things out to the point where I can see the
trigger for the really nasty variable performance. The trigger is
the machine running out of free memory. i.e. direct reclaim of clean
pages for the data in the new files in the page cache drives the
performance down by 25-50% and introduces significant variability.

So the variability doesn't seem to be solely related to the tag
allocator; it is contributing some via wait queue contention,
but it's definitely not the main contributor, nor the trigger...

MM-folk - the VM is running fake-numa=4 and has 16GB of RAM, and
each step in the workload is generating 3.2GB of dirty pages (i.e.
just on the dirty throttling threshold). It then does a concurrent
asynchronous fsync of the 800,000 dirty files it just created,
leaving 3.2GB of clean pages in the cache. The workload iterates
this several times. Once the machine runs out of free memory (2.5
iterations in) performance drops by about 30% on average, but the
drop varies between 20-60% randomly. I'm not concerned by a 30% drop
when memory fills up - I'm concerned by the volatility of the drop
that occurs. e.g:

FSUse%        Count         Size    Files/sec     App Overhead
     0       800000         4096      29938.0         13459475
     0      1600000         4096      28023.7         15662387
     0      2400000         4096      23704.6         16451761
     0      3200000         4096      16976.8         15029056
     0      4000000         4096      21858.3         15591604

Iteration 3 is where memory fills, and you can see that performance
dropped by 25%. Iteration 4 drops another 25%, then iteration 5
regains it. If I keep running the workload for more iterations, this
is pretty typical of the iteration-to-iteration variability, even
though every iteration is identical in behaviour as are the initial
conditions (i.e. memory full of clean, used-once pages).

This didn't happen in 3.15.0, but the behaviour may have been masked
by the block layer tag allocator CPU overhead dominating the system
behaviour.

OK, that's reassuring. I'll do some testing with the cyclic wait
queues, but probably not until Thursday. Alexanders patches might
potentially fix the variability as well, but if we can make-do
without the multiple wait queues, I'd much rather just kill it.

Did you see any spinlock contention with BT_WAIT_QUEUES = 1?

Yes. During the 15-20s of high IOPS dispatch rates the profile looks
like this:

-  36.00%  [kernel]  [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irq
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irq
      - 69.72% blk_sq_make_request
           generic_make_request
         + submit_bio
      + 24.81% __schedule
....
-  15.00%  [kernel]  [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
      - 32.87% prepare_to_wait_exclusive
           bt_get
           blk_mq_get_tag
           __blk_mq_alloc_request
           blk_mq_map_request
           blk_sq_make_request
           generic_make_request
         + submit_bio
      - 29.21% virtio_queue_rq
           __blk_mq_run_hw_queue
      + 11.69% complete
      + 8.21% finish_wait
        8.10% remove_wait_queue

But the IOPS rate has definitely increased with this config
- I just saw 90k, 100k and 110k IOPS in the last 3 iterations of the
workload (the above profile is from the 100k IOPS period). However,
the wall time was still only 3m58s, which again tends to implicate
the write() portion of the benchmark for causing the slowdowns
rather than the fsync() portion that is dispatching all the IO...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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