[dm-devel] dd to a striped device with 9 disks gets much lower throughput when oflag=direct used

[Richard Sharpe]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 7:16 AM, Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac at redhat.com> wrote:
> Dne 27.1.2012 16:03, Richard Sharpe napsal(a):
>
>> On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 12:52 AM, Christoph Hellwig<hch at infradead.org>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 05:06:42PM -0800, Richard Sharpe wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Why do I see such a big performance difference? Does writing to the
>>>> device also use the page cache if I don't specify DIRECT IO?
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes.  Trying adding conv=fdatasync to both versions to get more
>>> realistic results.
>>
>>
>> Thank you for that advice. I am comparing btrfs vs rolling my own
>> thing using the new dm thin-provisioning approach to get something
>> with resilient metadata, but I need to support two different types of
>> IO, one that uses directio and one that can take advantage of the page
>> cache.
>>
>> So far, btrfs gives me around 800MB/s with a similar setup (can't get
>> exactly the same setup) without DIRECTIO and 450MB/s with DIRECTIO. a
>> dm striped setup is giving me about 10% better throughput without
>> DIRECTIO but only about 45% of the performance with DIRECTIO.
>>
>
> You've mentioned you are using thinp device with stripping - do you have
> stripes properly aligned on data-block-size of thinp device ?
> (I think 9 disks are properly quite hard to align somehow on 3.2 kernel,
> since data block size needs to be power of 2 - I think 3.3 will have this
> relaxed to page size boundary.

Actually, so far I have not used any thinp devices, since from reading
the documentation it seemed that, for what I am doing, I need to give
thinp a mirrored device for its metadata and a striped device for its
data, so I thought I would try just a striped device.

Actually, I can cut that back to 8 devices in the stripe. I am using
4kiB block sizes and writing 256kiB blocks in the dd requests and
there is no parity involved so there should be no read-modify-write
cycles.

I imagine that if I push the write sizes up to a MB or more at a time
throughput will get better because at the moment each device is being
given 32kIB or 16kiB (a few devices) with DIRECTIO and with a larger
write size they will get more data at a time.

-- 
Regards,
Richard Sharpe