block, bfq: improve throughput boosting
The feedback-loop algorithm used by BFQ to compute queue (process) budgets is basically a set of three update rules, one for each of the main reasons why a queue may be expired. If many processes suddenly switch from sporadic I/O to greedy and sequential I/O, then these rules are quite slow to assign large budgets to these processes, and hence to achieve a high throughput. On the opposite side, BFQ assigns the maximum possible budget B_max to a just-created queue. This allows a high throughput to be achieved immediately if the associated process is I/O-bound and performs sequential I/O from the beginning. But it also increases the worst-case latency experienced by the first requests issued by the process, because the larger the budget of a queue waiting for service is, the later the queue will be served by B-WF2Q+ (Subsec 3.3 in [1]). This is detrimental for an interactive or soft real-time application. To tackle these throughput and latency problems, on one hand this patch changes the initial budget value to B_max/2. On the other hand, it re-tunes the three rules, adopting a more aggressive, multiplicative increase/linear decrease scheme. This scheme trades latency for throughput more than before, and tends to assign large budgets quickly to processes that are or become I/O-bound. For two of the expiration reasons, the new version of the rules also contains some more little improvements, briefly described below. *No more backlog.* In this case, the budget was larger than the number of sectors actually read/written by the process before it stopped doing I/O. Hence, to reduce latency for the possible future I/O requests of the process, the old rule simply set the next budget to the number of sectors actually consumed by the process. However, if there are still outstanding requests, then the process may have not yet issued its next request just because it is still waiting for the completion of some of the still outstanding ones. If this sub-case holds true, then the new rule, instead of decreasing the budget, doubles it, proactively, in the hope that: 1) a larger budget will fit the actual needs of the process, and 2) the process is sequential and hence a higher throughput will be achieved by serving the process longer after granting it access to the device. *Budget timeout*. The original rule set the new budget to the maximum value B_max, to maximize throughput and let all processes experiencing budget timeouts receive the same share of the device time. In our experiments we verified that this sudden jump to B_max did not provide sensible benefits; rather it increased the latency of processes performing sporadic and short I/O. The new rule only doubles the budget. [1] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR '12), June 2012. Slightly extended version: http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite- results.pdf Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
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