Re: contention on pwq->pool->lock under heavy NFS workload

[Tejun Heo]

Hey,

On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 02:37:17PM +0000, Chuck Lever III wrote:
> I'm using NFS/RDMA for my test because I can drive more IOPS with it.
> 
> I've found that setting the nfsiod and rpciod workqueues to "cpu"
> scope provide the best benefit for this workload. Changing the
> xprtiod workqueue to "cpu" had no discernible effect.
> 
> This tracks with the number of queue_work calls for each of these
> WQs. 59% of queue_work calls during the test are for the rpciod
> WQ, 21% are for nfsiod, and 2% is for xprtiod.
> 
> The same test with TCP (using IP-over-IB on the same physical network)
> shows no improvement on any test. That suggests there is a bottleneck
> somewhere else, when using TCP, that limits its throughput.

Yeah, you can make the necessary workqueues to default to CPU or SMT scope
using apply_workqueue_attrs(). The interface a bit cumbersome and we
probably wanna add convenience helpers to switch e.g. affinity scopes but
it's still just several lines of code.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun