The pernicious USB-stick stall problem

Posted Nov 9, 2013 8:54 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: The pernicious USB-stick stall problem

> It's a storage equivalent to the bufferbloat problem.

Good analogy. It stops at the cure though: with TCP/IP it's all about dropping packets! Back-pressure is extremely rare in networking because of Head Of Line blocking.

Speaking of Head Of Line blocking, I suspect the queues involved in this article don't make the difference between users, do they? In other words, someone writing a lot to a slow device will considerably slow other users, correct?

(Yes, I do realize USB sticks don't tend to have a lot of concurrent users :-)

The pernicious USB-stick stall problem

Posted Nov 9, 2013 15:30 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

This has become one of my new pet points, queuing theory as it applies to IO has a ton of overlap between Disk IO and Net IO and there should be frequent reminders to make sure that new research and techniques cross pollinate between the two different communities. Storage doesn't have the option to just drop requests and return IO errors like IP does to indicate contention but it can certainly block writers until latencies improve. The same algorithms with different tunables might be useful across subsystems.

The pernicious USB-stick stall problem

Posted Nov 11, 2013 5:32 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

It turns out that bufferbloat also applies to on-chip switch fabrics and the buffering you can find there.