On 8/18/2012 5:08 AM, Michael Tokarev wrote:

On 18.08.2012 09:09, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
[]

quoted

quoted

quoted

quoted

Output from iostat over the period in which the 4K write was done. Look
at kB read and kB written:

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
sdb1              0.60         0.00         1.60          0          8
sdc1              0.60         0.80         0.80          4          4
sdd1              0.60         0.00         1.60          0          8

As you can see, a single 4K read, and a few writes. You see a few blocks
more written that you'd expect because the superblock is updated too.

I'm no dd expert, but this looks like you're simply writing a 4KB block
to a new stripe, using an offset, but not to an existing stripe, as the
array is in a virgin state.  So it doesn't appear this test is going to
trigger RMW.  Don't you need now need to do another write in the same
stripe to to trigger RMW?  Maybe I'm just reading this wrong.

What is a "new stripe" and "existing stripe" ?  For md raid, all stripes
are equally existing as long as they fall within device boundaries, and
the rest are non-existing (outside of the device).  Unlike for an SSD for
example, there's no distinction between places already written and "fresh",
unwritten areas - all are treated exactly the same way.

quoted

quoted

That shouldn't matter, but that is easily checked ofcourse, by writing
some random random data first, then doing the dd 4K write also with
random data somewhere in the same area:

# dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=3 of=/dev/md0
3+0 records in
3+0 records out
3145728 bytes (3.1 MB) copied, 0.794494 s, 4.0 MB/s

Now the first 6 chunks are filled with random data, let write 4K
somewhere in there:

# dd if=/dev/urandom bs=4k count=1 seek=25 of=/dev/md0
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
4096 bytes (4.1 kB) copied, 0.10149 s, 40.4 kB/s

Output from iostat over the period in which the 4K write was done:

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
sdb1              0.60         0.00         1.60          0          8
sdc1              0.60         0.80         0.80          4          4
sdd1              0.60         0.00         1.60          0          8

According to your iostat output, the IO is identical for both tests.  So
either you triggered an RMW in the first test, or you haven't triggered
an RMW with either test.  Your fist test shouldn't have triggered RMW.
The second one should have.

Both tests did exactly the same, since in both cases the I/O requests
were the same, and md treats all (written and yet unwritten) areas the
same.

Interesting.  So md always performs RMW unless writing a full stripe.
This is worse behavior than I'd assumed, as RMW will occur nearly all of
the time with most workloads.  I'd assumed writes to "virgin" stripes
wouldn't trigger RMW.

In this test, there IS RMW cycle which is clearly shown.  I'm not sure
why md wrote 8Kb to sdb and sdd, and why it wrote the "extra" 4kb to
sdc.  Maybe it is the metadata/superblock update.  But it clearly read
data from sdc and wrote new data to all drives.  Assuming that all drives
received a 4kb write of metadata and excluding these, we'll have 4
kb written to sdb, 4kb read from sdc and 4kb written to sdd.  Which is
a clear RMW - suppose our new 4kb went to sdb, sdc is a second data disk
for this place and sdd is the parity.  It all works nicely.

Makes sense.  It's doing RMW in both tests.  It would work much more
nicely if a RMW wasn't required on partial writes to virgin stripes.  I
guess this isn't possible?

Overall, in order to update parity for a small write, there's no need to
read and rewrite whole stripe, only the small read+write is sufficient.

I find it interesting that parity for an entire stripe can be
recalculated using only the changed chunk and the existing parity value
as input to the calculation.  I would think the calculation would need
all chunks as input to generate the new parity value.  Then again I was
never a great mathematician.

There are, however, 2 variants of RMW possible, and one can be choosen
over another based on number of drives, amount of data being written
and amount of data available in the cache.  It can either read the
"missing" data blocks to calculate new parity (based on new blocks
and the read "missing" ones), or it can read parity block only,
substract data being replaced from there (xor is nice for that),
add new data and write new parity back.  When you have array with
large amount of drives and you write only small amount, the second
approach (reading old data (which might even be in cache already!),
reading the parity block, substracting old data and adding new to
there, and writing new data + new parity) will be much more often
than reading from all other components.  I guess.

If that's the way it actually works, it's obviously better than having
to read all the chunks.

So.. large chunk size is actually good, as it allows large I/Os
in one go.  There's a tradeoff ofcourse: the less the chunk size
is, the more chances we have to write full stripe without RMW at

Which is the way I've always approached striping with parity--smaller
chunks are better so we avoid RMW more often.

all, but at the same time, I/O size becomes very small too, which
is inefficient from the drive point of view.   

Most spinning drives these days have 16-64MB of cache and fast onboard
IO ASICs, thus quantity vs size of IOs shouldn't make much difference
unless you're constantly hammering your arrays.  If that's the case
you're very likely not using parity RAID anyway.

So there's a balance,
but I guess on a realistic-sized raid5 array (with good number of
drives, like 5), I/O size will likely be less than 256Kb (with
64Kb minimum realistic chunk size and 4 data drives), so expecting
full-stripe writes is not wise (unless it is streaming some large
data, in which case 512Kb chunk size (resulting in 2Mb stripes)
will do just as well).

Also, large chunks may have negative impact on alignment requiriments
(ie, it might be more difficult to fullfil the requiriment), but
this is different story.

Yes, as in the case of XFS journal alignment, where the maximum stripe
unit (chunk) size is 256KB and the recommended size is 32KB.  This is a
100% metadata workload, making full stripe writes difficult even with a
small stripe unit (chunk).  Large chunks simply make it much worse.  And
every modern filesystem uses a journal...

Overall, I think 512Kb is quite a good chunk size, even for a raid5
array.

I emphatically disagree.  For the vast majority of workloads, with a
512KB chunk RAID5/6, nearly every write will trigger RMW, and RMW is
what kills parity array performance.  And RMW is *far* more costly than
sending smaller vs larger IOs to the drives.

I recommend against using parity RAID in all cases where the write
workload is nontrivial, or the workload is random write heavy (most
workloads).  But if someone must use RAID5/6 for reason X, I recommend
the smallest chunk size they can get away with to increase the odds for
full stripe writes, decreasing the odds of RMW, and increasing overall
performance.

-- 
Stan