Re: [PATCH blktests v3 09/12] common/fio: Limit number of random jobs

[Daniel Wagner]

On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 09:41:37AM +0000, Chaitanya Kulkarni wrote:
> On 5/3/23 01:02, Daniel Wagner wrote:
> > Limit the number of random threads to 32 for big machines. This still
> > gives enough randomness but limits the resource usage.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Daniel Wagner <dwagner@xxxxxxx>
> > ---
> 
> I don't think we should change this, the point of all the tests is
> to not limit the resources but use threads at least equal to
> $(nproc), see recent patches from lenovo they have 448 cores,
> limiting 32 is < 10% CPUs and that is really small number for
> a large machine if we decide to run tests on that machine ...

I just wonder how handle the limits for the job size. Hannes asked to limit it
to 32 CPUs so that the job size doesn't get small, e.g. nvme_img_size=16M job
size per job with 448 CPUs is roughly 36kB. Is this good, bad or does it even
make sense? I don't know.

My question is what should the policy be? Should we reject configuration which
try to run too small jobs sizes? Reject anything below 1M for example? Or is
there a metric which we could as base for a limit calculation (disk geometry)?