Re: [RFC for-6.2/block V2] block: Change the granularity of io ticks from ms to ns

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Wed Dec 07 2022 - 21:55:41 EST


On 12/7/22 5:35?PM, Keith Busch wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 07, 2022 at 11:17:12PM +0000, Chaitanya Kulkarni wrote:
>> On 12/7/22 15:08, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>>
>>> My default peak testing runs at 122M IOPS. That's also the peak IOPS of
>>> the devices combined, and with iostats disabled. If I enabled iostats,
>>> then the performance drops to 112M IOPS. It's no longer device limited,
>>> that's a drop of about 8.2%.
>>>
>>
>> Wow, clearly not acceptable that's exactly I asked for perf
>> numbers :).
>
> For the record, we did say per-io ktime_get() has a measurable
> performance harm and should be aggregated.
>
> https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-block/msg89937.html

Yes, I iterated that in the v1 posting as well, and mentioned it was the
reason the time batching was done. From the results I posted, if you
look at a profile of the run, here are the time related additions:

+ 27.22% io_uring [kernel.vmlinux] [k] read_tsc
+ 4.37% io_uring [kernel.vmlinux] [k] ktime_get

which are #1 and $4, respectively. That's a LOT of added overhead. Not
sure why people think time keeping is free, particularly high
granularity time keeping. It's definitely not, and adding 2-3 per IO is
very noticeable.

--
Jens Axboe