Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 6, 2009 21:43 UTC (Sun) by kragil (guest, #34373)
In reply to: Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler by jbh
Parent article: Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Thank you.

It is a 901 with a fast 4GB SSD drive and a slow 8GB SSD. I have done some tweaking (Firefox ramdisk, ext4, noatime,noload) but maybe you have the right answers for my problems (I am using KDE4 on Fedora 11)

I will try 2.6.31 as soon as it is ready. I guess it might also help.

Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 7, 2009 8:56 UTC (Mon) by jbh (guest, #494) [Link] (6 responses)

Right! You probably have most things covered. Make sure you use the fast
ssd for the system of course, and save the 8GB for data. Three more things:
- barrier=0 mount option
- elevator=deadline boot option
- tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback

The first one (mount -o barrier=0) is subjectively the one that makes the
most real difference. Ext4 has barriers enabled by default, as opposed to
ext3.

I have a slow-only 16GB 900. With your setup, it might be effective to put
all journals on the fast disk (external journal), but I guess that's if you
actually enjoy tweaking :)

Finally it's possible to replace that slow SSD with a faster one from
RunCore for example. But that doesn't explain why windows does better
(which surprises me a bit as I've heard others complain that windows is
very bad at least on the 16BG --- but maybe it's ok if it's installed on
the fast 4GB disk).

Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 8, 2009 20:11 UTC (Tue) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link] (3 responses)

You don't need an SSD. You need BFS. Cheaper and works wonders.

Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 9, 2009 7:43 UTC (Wed) by jbh (guest, #494) [Link] (2 responses)

Huh? I'm not sure what you mean, I already have an SSD. That's the problem: it's very slow, random writes <100kB/s. And I strongly doubt that BFS can magically fix that.

What CAN fix it is a combination of: (i) write less, (ii) don't wait for writes. That's the point of the tuning. Nothing to do with process scheduling.

Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 9, 2009 8:41 UTC (Wed) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link] (1 responses)

This was related to the original comment by kragil you replied to. An SSD won't fix the problems described in this thread.

Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 9, 2009 8:47 UTC (Wed) by jbh (guest, #494) [Link]

Ah, then we're in full agreement. An SSD will in fact *cause* the problems
described in this thread.

;-)

Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 11, 2009 14:54 UTC (Fri) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link] (1 responses)

> - barrier=0 mount option
> - elevator=deadline boot option
>- tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback

Regarding the Deadline i/o scheduler, according to Wikipedia, "The kernel docs suggest this is the preferred scheduler for database systems, especially if you have TCQ aware disks, or any system with high disk performance.". Since an ssd on an eeepc is neither a database system, nor TCQ aware (TCQ being meaningless for SSDs), nor has high disk performance, what property makes it good for that workload?

Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Posted Sep 11, 2009 15:45 UTC (Fri) by jbh (guest, #494) [Link]

Good question! The desired property here is mainly "not CFQ", since the
default CFQ scheduler seems to behave badly (wrt IO latency) with cheap
SSDs. See for example http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=23580 .

The noop scheduler is also sometimes recommended, but the linked thread
suggests it may suffer from IO starvation since it doesn't do any balancing
between processes.

[ it also recommends the following, which I haven't tried:
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch
]