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: Holger Hoffstätte <holger@applied-asynchrony.com>
Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
778c02a236