[dm-devel] dm-mpath request merging concerns [was: Re: It's time to put together the schedule]

[Mike Snitzer]

On Mon, Feb 23 2015 at  4:19pm -0500,
Benjamin Marzinski <bmarzins at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 02:56:03PM -0500, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 23 2015 at  1:34pm -0500,
> > Benjamin Marzinski <bmarzins at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:18:36AM -0600, Mike Christie wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > If the device/transport is fast or the workload is low, the multipath_busy
> > > > never returns busy, then we can hit Hannes's issue. For 4 paths, we just
> > > > might not be able to fill up the paths and hit the busy check. With only 2
> > > > paths, we might be slow enough or the workload is heavy enough to keep the
> > > > paths busy and so we hit the busy check and do more merging.
> > > 
> > > Netapp is seeing this same issue.  It seems like we might want to make
> > > multipath_busy more aggressive about returning busy, which would
> > > probably require multipath tracking the size and frequency of the
> > > requests.  If it determines that it's getting a lot of requests that
> > > could have been merged, it could start throttling how fast requests are
> > > getting pulled off the queue, even there underlying paths aren't busy.
> > 
> > the ->busy() checks are just an extra check the shouldn't be the primary
> > method for governing the effectiveness of the DM-mpath queue's elevator.
> > 
> > I need to get back to basics to appreciate how the existing block layer
> > is able to have an effective elevator regardless of the device's speed.
> > And why isn't request-based DM able to just take advantage of it?
> 
> I always thought that at least one of the schedulers always kept
> incoming requests on an interal queue for at least a little bit to see
> if any merging could happen, even if they could otherwise just be added
> to the request queue. but I admit to being a little vague on how exactly
> they all work.

CFQ has idling, etc.  Which promotes merging.

> Another place where we could break out of constantly pulling requests of
> the queue before they're merged is in dm_prep_fn().  If we thought that
> we should break and let merging happen, we could return BLKPREP_DEFER.

It is blk_queue_bio(), via q->make_request_fn, that is intended to
actually do the merging.  What I'm hearing is that we're only getting
some small amount of merging if:
1) the 2 path case is used and therefore ->busy hook within
   q->request_fn is not taking the request off the queue, so there is
   more potential for later merging
2) the 4 path case IFF nr_requests is reduced to induce ->busy, which
   only promoted merging as a side-effect like 1) above

The reality is we aren't getting merging where it _should_ be happening
(in blk_queue_bio).  We need to understand why that is.