Re: CFQ idling kills I/O performance on ext4 with blkio cgroup controller

[Paolo Valente]

> Il giorno 21 mag 2019, alle ore 15:20, Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@xxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:
> 
> 
> 
>> Il giorno 21 mag 2019, alle ore 13:25, Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@xxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Il giorno 20 mag 2019, alle ore 12:19, Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@xxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> Il giorno 18 mag 2019, alle ore 22:50, Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:
>>>> 
>>>> On 5/18/19 11:39 AM, Paolo Valente wrote:
>>>>> I've addressed these issues in my last batch of improvements for BFQ,
>>>>> which landed in the upcoming 5.2. If you give it a try, and still see
>>>>> the problem, then I'll be glad to reproduce it, and hopefully fix it
>>>>> for you.
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Hi Paolo,
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you for looking into this!
>>>> 
>>>> I just tried current mainline at commit 72cf0b07, but unfortunately
>>>> didn't see any improvement:
>>>> 
>>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test.img bs=512 count=10000 oflag=dsync
>>>> 
>>>> With mq-deadline, I get:
>>>> 
>>>> 5120000 bytes (5.1 MB, 4.9 MiB) copied, 3.90981 s, 1.3 MB/s
>>>> 
>>>> With bfq, I get:
>>>> 5120000 bytes (5.1 MB, 4.9 MiB) copied, 84.8216 s, 60.4 kB/s
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Hi Srivatsa,
>>> thanks for reproducing this on mainline.  I seem to have reproduced a
>>> bonsai-tree version of this issue.
>> 
>> Hi again Srivatsa,
>> I've analyzed the trace, and I've found the cause of the loss of
>> throughput in on my side.  To find out whether it is the same cause as
>> on your side, I've prepared a script that executes your test and takes
>> a trace during the test.  If ok for you, could you please
>> - change the value for the DEVS parameter in the attached script, if
>> needed
>> - execute the script
>> - send me the trace file that the script will leave in your working
>> dir
>> 
> 
> Sorry, I forgot to add that I also need you to, first, apply the
> attached patch (it will make BFQ generate the log I need).
> 

Sorry again :) This time for attaching one more patch.  This is
basically a blind fix attempt, based on what I see in my VM.

So, instead of only sending me a trace, could you please:
1) apply this new patch on top of the one I attached in my previous email
2) repeat your test and report results
3) regardless of whether bfq performance improves, take a trace with
   my script (I've attached a new version that doesn't risk to output an
   annoying error message as the previous one)

Thanks,
Paolo

Attachment: dsync_test.sh
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Attachment: 0001-block-bfq-boost-injection.patch.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data

> Thanks,
> Paolo
> 
> <0001-block-bfq-add-logs-and-BUG_ONs.patch.gz>
> 
>> Looking forward to your trace,
>> Paolo
>> 
>> <dsync_test.sh>
>>> Before digging into the block
>>> trace, I'd like to ask you for some feedback.
>>> 
>>> First, in my test, the total throughput of the disk happens to be
>>> about 20 times as high as that enjoyed by dd, regardless of the I/O
>>> scheduler.  I guess this massive overhead is normal with dsync, but
>>> I'd like know whether it is about the same on your side. This will
>>> help me understand whether I'll actually be analyzing about the same
>>> problem as yours.
>>> 
>>> Second, the commands I used follow.  Do they implement your test case
>>> correctly?
>>> 
>>> [root@localhost tmp]# mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio/testgrp
>>> [root@localhost tmp]# echo $BASHPID > /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio/testgrp/cgroup.procs
>>> [root@localhost tmp]# cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
>>> [mq-deadline] bfq none
>>> [root@localhost tmp]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test.img bs=512 count=10000 oflag=dsync
>>> 10000+0 record dentro
>>> 10000+0 record fuori
>>> 5120000 bytes (5,1 MB, 4,9 MiB) copied, 14,6892 s, 349 kB/s
>>> [root@localhost tmp]# echo bfq > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
>>> [root@localhost tmp]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test.img bs=512 count=10000 oflag=dsync
>>> 10000+0 record dentro
>>> 10000+0 record fuori
>>> 5120000 bytes (5,1 MB, 4,9 MiB) copied, 20,1953 s, 254 kB/s
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Paolo
>>> 
>>>> Please let me know if any more info about my setup might be helpful.
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you!
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Srivatsa
>>>> VMware Photon OS
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Il giorno 18 mag 2019, alle ore 00:16, Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> One of my colleagues noticed upto 10x - 30x drop in I/O throughput
>>>>>> running the following command, with the CFQ I/O scheduler:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test.img bs=512 count=10000 oflags=dsync
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Throughput with CFQ: 60 KB/s
>>>>>> Throughput with noop or deadline: 1.5 MB/s - 2 MB/s
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I spent some time looking into it and found that this is caused by the
>>>>>> undesirable interaction between 4 different components:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> - blkio cgroup controller enabled
>>>>>> - ext4 with the jbd2 kthread running in the root blkio cgroup
>>>>>> - dd running on ext4, in any other blkio cgroup than that of jbd2
>>>>>> - CFQ I/O scheduler with defaults for slice_idle and group_idle
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> When docker is enabled, systemd creates a blkio cgroup called
>>>>>> system.slice to run system services (and docker) under it, and a
>>>>>> separate blkio cgroup called user.slice for user processes. So, when
>>>>>> dd is invoked, it runs under user.slice.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The dd command above includes the dsync flag, which performs an
>>>>>> fdatasync after every write to the output file. Since dd is writing to
>>>>>> a file on ext4, jbd2 will be active, committing transactions
>>>>>> corresponding to those fdatasync requests from dd. (In other words, dd
>>>>>> depends on jdb2, in order to make forward progress). But jdb2 being a
>>>>>> kernel thread, runs in the root blkio cgroup, as opposed to dd, which
>>>>>> runs under user.slice.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Now, if the I/O scheduler in use for the underlying block device is
>>>>>> CFQ, then its inter-queue/inter-group idling takes effect (via the
>>>>>> slice_idle and group_idle parameters, both of which default to 8ms).
>>>>>> Therefore, everytime CFQ switches between processing requests from dd
>>>>>> vs jbd2, this 8ms idle time is injected, which slows down the overall
>>>>>> throughput tremendously!
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> To verify this theory, I tried various experiments, and in all cases,
>>>>>> the 4 pre-conditions mentioned above were necessary to reproduce this
>>>>>> performance drop. For example, if I used an XFS filesystem (which
>>>>>> doesn't use a separate kthread like jbd2 for journaling), or if I dd'ed
>>>>>> directly to a block device, I couldn't reproduce the performance
>>>>>> issue. Similarly, running dd in the root blkio cgroup (where jbd2
>>>>>> runs) also gets full performance; as does using the noop or deadline
>>>>>> I/O schedulers; or even CFQ itself, with slice_idle and group_idle set
>>>>>> to zero.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> These results were reproduced on a Linux VM (kernel v4.19) on ESXi,
>>>>>> both with virtualized storage as well as with disk pass-through,
>>>>>> backed by a rotational hard disk in both cases. The same problem was
>>>>>> also seen with the BFQ I/O scheduler in kernel v5.1.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Searching for any earlier discussions of this problem, I found an old
>>>>>> thread on LKML that encountered this behavior [1], as well as a docker
>>>>>> github issue [2] with similar symptoms (mentioned later in the
>>>>>> thread).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> So, I'm curious to know if this is a well-understood problem and if
>>>>>> anybody has any thoughts on how to fix it.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Thank you very much!
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> [1]. https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/11/19/359
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> [2]. https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/21485
>>>>>> https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/21485#issuecomment-222941103
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>> Srivatsa

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