On Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:10:33 -0500
Vivek Goyal [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 12:14:11AM +0100, Andrea Righi wrote:

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On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 10:23:54AM -0500, Vivek Goyal wrote:

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Agreed. Granularity of per inode level might be accetable in many 
cases. Again, I am worried faster group getting stuck behind slower
group.

I am wondering if we are trying to solve the problem of ASYNC write throttling
at wrong layer. Should ASYNC IO be throttled before we allow task to write to
page cache. The way we throttle the process based on dirty ratio, can we
just check for throttle limits also there or something like that.(I think
that's what you had done in your initial throttling controller implementation?)

Right. This is exactly the same approach I've used in my old throttling
controller: throttle sync READs and WRITEs at the block layer and async
WRITEs when the task is dirtying memory pages.

This is probably the simplest way to resolve the problem of faster group
getting blocked by slower group, but the controller will be a little bit
more leaky, because the writeback IO will be never throttled and we'll
see some limited IO spikes during the writeback.

Yes writeback will not be throttled. Not sure how big a problem that is.

- We have controlled the input rate. So that should help a bit.
- May be one can put some high limit on root cgroup to in blkio throttle
  controller to limit overall WRITE rate of the system.
- For SATA disks, try to use CFQ which can try to minimize the impact of
  WRITE.

It will atleast provide consistent bandwindth experience to application.

Right.

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However, this is always
a better solution IMHO respect to the current implementation that is
affected by that kind of priority inversion problem.

I can try to add this logic to the current blk-throttle controller if
you think it is worth to test it.

At this point of time I have few concerns with this approach.

- Configuration issues. Asking user to plan for SYNC ans ASYNC IO
  separately is inconvenient. One has to know the nature of workload.

- Most likely we will come up with global limits (atleast to begin with),
  and not per device limit. That can lead to contention on one single
  lock and scalability issues on big systems.

Having said that, this approach should reduce the kernel complexity a lot.
So if we can do some intelligent locking to limit the overhead then it
will boil down to reduced complexity in kernel vs ease of use to user. I 
guess at this point of time I am inclined towards keeping it simple in
kernel.

BTW, with this approach probably we can even get rid of the page
tracking stuff for now.

Agreed.

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If we don't consider the swap IO, any other IO
operation from our point of view will happen directly from process
context (writes in memory + sync reads from the block device).

Why do we need to account for swap IO? Application never asked for swap
IO. It is kernel's decision to move soem pages to swap to free up some
memory. What's the point in charging those pages to application group
and throttle accordingly?

I think swap I/O should be controlled by memcg's dirty_ratio.
But, IIRC, NEC guy had a requirement for this...

I think some enterprise cusotmer may want to throttle the whole speed of
swapout I/O (not swapin)...so, they may be glad if they can limit throttle
the I/O against a disk partition or all I/O tagged as 'swapio' rather than
some cgroup name.

But I'm afraid slow swapout may consume much dirty_ratio and make things
worse ;)

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However, I'm sure we'll need the page tracking also for the blkio
controller soon or later. This is an important information and also the
proportional bandwidth controller can take advantage of it.

Yes page tracking will be needed for CFQ proportional bandwidth ASYNC
write support. But until and unless we implement memory cgroup dirty
ratio and figure a way out to make writeback logic cgroup aware, till
then I think page tracking stuff is not really useful.

I think Greg Thelen is now preparing patches for dirty_ratio.

Thanks,
-Kame