Re: [PATCH] virtio_blk: set the default scheduler to none

[Paolo Bonzini]

On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 6:54 AM Li Feng <fengli@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I have ran all io pattern on my another host.
> Notes:
> q1 means fio iodepth = 1
> j1 means fio num jobs = 1
>
> VCPU = 4, VMEM = 2GiB, fio using directio.
>
> The results of most jobs are better than the deadline, and some are lower than the deadline。

I think this analysis is a bit simplistic. In particular:

For low queue depth improvements are relatively small but we also have
the worst cases:

4k-randread-q1-j1      |    12325  |     13356  |   8.37%
256k-randread-q1-j1    |     1865  |      1883  |   0.97%
4k-randwrite-q1-j1     |     9923  |     10163  |   2.42%
256k-randwrite-q1-j1   |     2762  |      2833  |   2.57%
4k-read-q1-j1          |    21499  |     22223  |   3.37%
256k-read-q1-j1        |     1919  |      1951  |   1.67%
4k-write-q1-j1         |    10120  |     10262  |   1.40%
256k-write-q1-j1       |     2779  |      2744  |  -1.26%
4k-randread-q1-j2      |    24238  |     25478  |   5.12%
256k-randread-q1-j2    |     3656  |      3649  |  -0.19%
4k-randwrite-q1-j2     |    17096  |     18112  |   5.94%
256k-randwrite-q1-j2   |     5188  |      4914  |  -5.28%
4k-read-q1-j2          |    36890  |     31768  | -13.88%
256k-read-q1-j2        |     3708  |      4028  |   8.63%
4k-write-q1-j2         |    17786  |     18519  |   4.12%
256k-write-q1-j2       |     4756  |      5035  |   5.87%

(I ran a paired t-test and it confirms that the improvements overall
are not statistically significant).

Small, high queue depth I/O is where the improvements are definitely
significant, but even then the scheduler seems to help in the j2 case:

4k-randread-q128-j1    |   204739  |    319066  |  55.84%
4k-randwrite-q128-j1   |   137400  |    152081  |  10.68%
4k-read-q128-j1        |   158806  |    345269  | 117.42%
4k-write-q128-j1       |    47576  |    209236  | 339.79%
4k-randread-q128-j2    |   390090  |    577300  |  47.99%
4k-randwrite-q128-j2   |   143373  |    140560  |  -1.96%
4k-read-q128-j2        |   399500  |    409857  |   2.59%
4k-write-q128-j2       |   175756  |    159109  |  -9.47%

At higher sizes, even high queue depth results have high variability.
There are clear improvements for sequential reads, but not so much for
everything else:

256k-randread-q128-j1  |    24257  |     22851  |  -5.80%
256k-randwrite-q128-j1 |     9353  |      9233  |  -1.28%
256k-read-q128-j1      |    18918  |     23710  |  25.33%
256k-write-q128-j1     |     9199  |      9337  |   1.50%
256k-randread-q128-j2  |    21992  |     23437  |   6.57%
256k-randwrite-q128-j2 |     9423  |      9314  |  -1.16%
256k-read-q128-j2      |    19360  |     21467  |  10.88%
256k-write-q128-j2     |     9292  |      9293  |   0.01%

I would focus on small I/O with varying queue depths, to understand at
which point the performance starts to improve; queue depth of 128 may
not be representative of common usage, especially high queue depth
*sequential* access which is where the biggest effects are visibie.
Maybe you can look at improvements in the scheduler instead?

Paolo