Commit 2cad4018 authored Sep 11, 2013 by Fengguang Wu Committed by Linus Torvalds Sep 11, 2013

readahead: make context readahead more conservative



This helps performance on moderately dense random reads on SSD.

Transaction-Per-Second numbers provided by Taobao:

		QPS	case
		-------------------------------------------------------
		7536	disable context readahead totally
w/ patch:	7129	slower size rampup and start RA on the 3rd read
		6717	slower size rampup
w/o patch:	5581	unmodified context readahead

Before, readahead will be started whenever reading page N+1 when it happen
to read N recently.  After patch, we'll only start readahead when *three*
random reads happen to access pages N, N+1, N+2.  The probability of this
happening is extremely low for pure random reads, unless they are very
dense, which actually deserves some readahead.

Also start with a smaller readahead window.  The impact to interleaved
sequential reads should be small, because for a long run stream, the the
small readahead window rampup phase is negletable.

The context readahead actually benefits clustered random reads on HDD
whose seek cost is pretty high.  However as SSD is increasingly used for
random read workloads it's better for the context readahead to concentrate
on interleaved sequential reads.

Another SSD rand read test from Miao

        # file size:        2GB
        # read IO amount: 625MB
        sysbench --test=fileio          \
                --max-requests=10000    \
                --num-threads=1         \
                --file-num=1            \
                --file-block-size=64K   \
                --file-test-mode=rndrd  \
                --file-fsync-freq=0     \
                --file-fsync-end=off    run

shows the performance of btrfs grows up from 69MB/s to 121MB/s, ext4 from
104MB/s to 121MB/s.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Tested-by: Tao Ma <tm@tao.ma>
Tested-by: Miao Xie <miaox@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent 139c2d75

mm/readahead.c

+4 −4

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -371,10 +371,10 @@ static int try_context_readahead(struct address_space *mapping,
		size = count_history_pages(mapping, ra, offset, max);

		/*
		* no history pages:
		* not enough history pages:
		* it could be a random read
		*/
		if (!size)
		if (size <= req_size)
		return 0;

		/*
		@@ -385,8 +385,8 @@ static int try_context_readahead(struct address_space *mapping,
		size *= 2;

		ra->start = offset;
		ra->size = get_init_ra_size(size + req_size, max);
		ra->async_size = ra->size;
		ra->size = min(size + req_size, max);
		ra->async_size = 1;

		return 1;
		}

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