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

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

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

quoted

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

quoted

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

quoted

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:

$ ps -ef |grep kworker |wc -l
4693
$

Profiles from 3.15 + xfs for-next + xfs aio_fsync show:

-  51.33%  [kernel]            [k] percpu_ida_alloc
   - percpu_ida_alloc
      + 85.73% blk_mq_wait_for_tags
      + 14.23% blk_mq_get_tag
-  14.25%  [kernel]            [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
      - 66.26% virtio_queue_rq
         - __blk_mq_run_hw_queue
            - 99.65% blk_mq_run_hw_queue
               + 99.47% blk_mq_insert_requests
               + 0.53% blk_mq_insert_request
.....
-   7.91%  [kernel]            [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irq
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irq
      - 69.59% __schedule
         - 86.49% schedule
            + 47.72% percpu_ida_alloc
            + 21.75% worker_thread
            + 19.12% schedule_timeout
....
      + 18.06% blk_mq_make_request

Runtime:

real    4m1.243s
user    0m47.724s
sys     11m56.724s

Most of the excessive CPU usage is coming from the blk-mq layer, and
XFS is barely showing up in the profiles at all - the IDA tag
allocator is burning 8 CPUs at about 60,000 write IOPS....

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:

-  34.62%  [kernel]  [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
      - 58.22% prepare_to_wait
           100.00% bt_get
              blk_mq_get_tag
              __blk_mq_alloc_request
              blk_mq_map_request
              blk_sq_make_request
              generic_make_request
      - 22.51% virtio_queue_rq
           __blk_mq_run_hw_queue
....
-  21.56%  [kernel]  [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irq
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irq
      - 58.73% __schedule
         - 53.42% io_schedule
              99.88% bt_get
                 blk_mq_get_tag
                 __blk_mq_alloc_request
                 blk_mq_map_request
                 blk_sq_make_request
                 generic_make_request
         - 35.58% schedule
            + 49.31% worker_thread
            + 32.45% schedule_timeout
            + 10.35% _xfs_log_force_lsn
            + 3.10% xlog_cil_force_lsn
....

.....

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.

Profiles on a slow run look like:

-  43.43%  [kernel]  [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irq
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irq
      - 64.23% blk_sq_make_request
           generic_make_request
          submit_bio                                                                                                                                                  ¿
      + 26.79% __schedule
...
-  15.00%  [kernel]  [k] _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
   - _raw_spin_unlock_irqrestore
      - 39.81% virtio_queue_rq
           __blk_mq_run_hw_queue
      + 24.13% complete
      + 17.74% prepare_to_wait_exclusive
      + 9.66% remove_wait_queue

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...

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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