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aio: implement request batching

From:  Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
To:  zach.brown@oracle.com
Subject:  [patch v4 0/3] aio: implement request batching
Date:  Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:54:20 -0400
Message-ID:  <x49zl8976g3.fsf@segfault.boston.devel.redhat.com>
Cc:  linux-aio <linux-aio@kvack.org>, Linux Kernel Mailing <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Archive-link:  Article, Thread

Hi,

In this, the 4th iteration of the patch set, I've addressed the concerns
of Jens and Zach as follows:

- In the O_DIRECT write path, we get rid of WRITE_ODIRECT in favor of
  WRITE_SYNC_PLUG
- request batching is only done for AIO operations that could
  potentially benefit from it
- Initialization of the hash table is done using the gcc array
  initialization syntax

Further, I got rid of a compiler warning that I had introduced in the
last patch set.  I'll continue to test this under a variety of loads,
but would certainly appreciate it if others could give it a spin.

Patch overview / reason for existence:

Some workloads issue batches of small I/Os, and the performance is poor
due to the call to blk_run_address_space for every single iocb.  Nathan
Roberts pointed this out, and suggested that by deferring this call
until all I/Os in the iocb array are submitted to the block layer, we
can realize some impressive performance gains.

For example, running against a simple SATA disk driving a queue depth of
128, we can improve the performance of O_DIRECT writes twofold for 4k
I/Os, and similarly impressive numbers for other I/O sizes:
  http://people.redhat.com/jmoyer/dbras/vanilla-vs-v4/metal...

For read workloads on somewhat faster storage, we see similar benefits
for batches of smaller I/Os as well:
  http://people.redhat.com/jmoyer/dbras/vanilla-vs-v4/thor-...
That's 230+MB/s for vanilla 4k reads, batches of 16 vs. 410MB/s for
patched.  When there are multiple threads competing for the disk, I
haven't witnessed such crazy numbers, however.

Cheers,
Jeff
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