• Paolo Valente's avatar
    block, bfq: increase idling for weight-raised queues · 778c02a2
    Paolo Valente authored
    If a sync bfq_queue has a higher weight than some other queue, and
    remains temporarily empty while in service, then, to preserve the
    bandwidth share of the queue, it is necessary to plug I/O dispatching
    until a new request arrives for the queue. In addition, a timeout
    needs to be set, to avoid waiting for ever if the process associated
    with the queue has actually finished its I/O.
    
    Even with the above timeout, the device is however not fed with new
    I/O for a while, if the process has finished its I/O. If this happens
    often, then throughput drops and latencies grow. For this reason, the
    timeout is kept rather low: 8 ms is the current default.
    
    Unfortunately, such a low value may cause, on the opposite end, a
    violation of bandwidth guarantees for a process that happens to issue
    new I/O too late. The higher the system load, the higher the
    probability that this happens to some process. This is a problem in
    scenarios where service guarantees matter more than throughput. One
    important case are weight-raised queues, which need to be granted a
    very high fraction of the bandwidth.
    
    To address this issue, this commit lower-bounds the plugging timeout
    for weight-raised queues to 20 ms. This simple change provides
    relevant benefits. For example, on a PLEXTOR PX-256M5S, with which
    gnome-terminal starts in 0.6 seconds if there is no other I/O in
    progress, the same applications starts in
    - 0.8 seconds, instead of 1.2 seconds, if ten files are being read
      sequentially in parallel
    - 1 second, instead of 2 seconds, if, in parallel, five files are
      being read sequentially, and five more files are being written
      sequentially
    Tested-by: default avatarHolger Hoffstätte <holger@applied-asynchrony.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarOleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    778c02a2
bfq-iosched.c 195 KB