[dm-devel] [RFC PATCH 1/1] dm: add clone target

Nikos Tsironis ntsironis at arrikto.com
Mon Jul 22 20:16:13 UTC 2019


On 7/17/19 5:41 PM, Heinz Mauelshagen wrote:
> Hi Nikos,
> 
> thanks for elaborating on those details.
> 
> Hash table collisions, exception store entry commit overhead,
> SSD cache flush issues etc. are all valid points relative to performance
> and work set footprints in general.
> 
> Do you have any performance numbers for your solution vs.
> a snapshot one showing the approach is actually superior in
> in real configurations?

Hi Heinz,

Please see below for detailed benchmark results.

> 
> I'm asking this particularly in the context of your remark
> 
> "A write to a not yet hydrated region will be delayed until the 
> corresponding
> region has been hydrated and the hydration of the region starts 
> immediately."
> 
> which'll cause a potentially large working set of delayed writes unless 
> those
> cover the whole eventually larger than 4K region.
> How does your 'clone' target perform on such heavy write situations?
> 

This situation occurs only when the writes are smaller than the region
size of dm-clone. E.g., if the user sets a region size of 64K and issues
4K writes.

In this case, we experience a performance drop due to COW. This is true
_both_ for dm-snapshot and dm-clone and is _unavoidable_.

But, the common case will be setting a region size equal to the file
system block size, e.g., 4K, and thus avoiding the COW overhead. Note
that LVM snapshots _already_ use 4K as the _default_ chunk size.

Nevertheless, even for larger region/chunk sizes, dm-clone outperforms
the dm-snapshot based solution, as is evident by the following
performance measurements.

> In general, performance and storage footprint test results based on the 
> same set
> of read/write tests including heavy loads with region size variations 
> run on 'clone'
> and 'snapshot' would help your point.
> 
> Heinz
> 

I used fio to run a series of read and write tests that compare the
performance of dm-clone against your proposed dm-snapshot over dm-raid
solution.

I used a 375GB spinning disk as the origin device storing the data to be
cloned and a 375GB SSD as the clone device and for storing both
dm-clone's metadata and dm-snapshot's exceptions (COW space).

dm-clone stack (dmsetup ls --tree)
==================================

clone (254:3)
 ├─source--vg-origin--lv (254:2)
 │  └─ (8:16)
 ├─dest--vg-clone--lv (254:0)
 │  └─ (259:0)
 └─dest--vg-meta--lv (254:1)
    └─ (259:0)

dm-snapshot + dm-raid stack (dmsetup ls --tree)
===============================================

mirrorvg-snap (254:7)
 ├─mirrorvg-snap-cow (254:6)
 │  └─ (259:0)
 └─mirrorvg-raid1--lv-real (254:5)
    ├─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rimage_1 (254:3)
    │  └─ (259:0)
    ├─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rmeta_1 (254:2)
    │  └─ (259:0)
    ├─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rimage_0 (254:1)
    │  └─ (8:16)
    └─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rmeta_0 (254:0)
       └─ (8:16)
mirrorvg-raid1--lv (254:4)
 └─mirrorvg-raid1--lv-real (254:5)
    ├─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rimage_1 (254:3)
    │  └─ (259:0)
    ├─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rmeta_1 (254:2)
    │  └─ (259:0)
    ├─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rimage_0 (254:1)
    │  └─ (8:16)
    └─mirrorvg-raid1--lv_rmeta_0 (254:0)
       └─ (8:16)

fio configuration
=================

1. Random Read/Write latency benchmark

  ioengine=psync, bs=4K, numjobs=1, direct=1, timeout=90, time_based=1,
  rw=randwrite/randread

2. Random Read/Write IOPS benchmark

  ioengine=libaio, bs=4K, numjobs=1, direct=1, iodepth=32, timeout=90,
  time_based=1, rw=randwrite/randread

3. Sequential Read/Write Bandwidth

  ioengine=libaio, bs=256K, numjobs=1, direct=1, iodepth=32, timeout=90,
  time_based=1, rw=write/read

Baseline
========

As a reference, the benchmark results for the raw devices:

+--------+--------------------+-----------------+--------------+
| device | rand-write latency | rand-write IOPS | seq-write BW |
+--------+--------------------+-----------------+--------------+
|  HDD   |      701 usec      |       1425      |   120 MB/s   |
|  SSD   |     72.6 usec      |      64490      |   390 MB/s   |
+--------+--------------------+-----------------+--------------+

+--------+-------------------+----------------+-------------+
| device | rand-read latency | rand-read IOPS | seq-read BW |
+--------+-------------------+----------------+-------------+
|  HDD   |      1.4 msec     |      712       |   120 MB/s  |
|  SSD   |      122 usec     |     150920     |   701 MB/s  |
+--------+-------------------+----------------+-------------+

dm-clone vs dm-snapshot+dm-raid
===============================

Latency benchmark
-----------------

1. Random write latency

+-------------------+-----------+-------------+
| region/chunk size |  dm-clone | dm-snapshot |
+-------------------+-----------+-------------+
|        4 KB       | 75.7 usec |   6.8 msec  |
|        8 KB       |  1.9 msec |  17.7 msec  |
|       16 KB       |  2.1 msec |  15.8 msec  |
|       32 KB       |  2.2 msec |  33.6 msec  |
|       64 KB       |  2.6 msec |  31.2 msec  |
|       128 KB      |  3.8 msec |  35.7 msec  |
+-------------------+-----------+-------------+

* dm-snapshot+dm-raid has 7.5 to 90 times _more_ write latency than
  dm-clone.

* For the common case of a 4 KB region/chunk size, dm-clone has minimal
  overhead over the SSD device.

* Even for region/chunk sizes greater than 4KB dm-clone's overhead is
  minimal compared to dm-snapshot+dm-raid.

2. Random read latency

+-------------------+----------+-------------+
| region/chunk size | dm-clone | dm-snapshot |
+-------------------+----------+-------------+
|        4 KB       | 1.5 msec |  10.7 msec  |
|        8 KB       | 1.5 msec |   9.7 msec  |
|       16 KB       | 1.5 msec |  11.9 msec  |
|       32 KB       | 1.5 msec |  28.6 msec  |
|       64 KB       | 1.5 msec |  27.5 msec  |
|       128 KB      | 1.5 msec |  27.3 msec  |
+-------------------+----------+-------------+

* dm-snapshot+dm-raid has 6.5 to 19 times _more_ read latency than
  dm-clone.

* For all region/chunk sizes dm-clone has minimal overhead over the HDD
  device.

IOPS benchmark
--------------

1. Random write IOPS

+-------------------+----------+-------------+
| region/chunk size | dm-clone | dm-snapshot |
+-------------------+----------+-------------+
|        4 KB       |  62347   |     3758    |
|        8 KB       |   696    |     388     |
|       16 KB       |   667    |     217     |
|       32 KB       |   614    |     207     |
|       64 KB       |   531    |     186     |
|       128 KB      |   417    |     159     |
+-------------------+----------+-------------+

* dm-clone achieves 1.8 to 16.6 times _more_ IOPS than
  dm-snapshot+dm-raid.

* For the common case of a 4 KB region/chunk size, dm-clone has minimal
  overhead over the SSD device.

* Even for region/chunk sizes greater than 4KB dm-clone achieves
  significantly more IOPS than dm-snapshot+dm-raid.

2. Random read IOPS

+-------------------+----------+-------------+
| region/chunk size | dm-clone | dm-snapshot |
+-------------------+----------+-------------+
|        4 KB       |   767    |     680     |
|        8 KB       |   714    |     677     |
|       16 KB       |   715    |     338     |
|       32 KB       |   717    |     338     |
|       64 KB       |   720    |     338     |
|       128 KB      |   724    |     339     |
+-------------------+----------+-------------+

* dm-clone achieves 1.1 to 2.1 times _more_ IOPS than
  dm-snapshot+dm-raid.

Bandwidth benchmark
-------------------

1. Sequential write BW

+-------------------+------------+-------------+
| region/chunk size |  dm-clone  | dm-snapshot |
+-------------------+------------+-------------+
|        4 KB       | 389.4 MB/s |  135.3 MB/s |
|        8 KB       | 390.5 MB/s |  231.7 MB/s |
|       16 KB       | 390.5 MB/s |  213.1 MB/s |
|       32 KB       | 390.4 MB/s |  214.0 MB/s |
|       64 KB       | 390.3 MB/s |  214.0 MB/s |
|       128 KB      | 390.5 MB/s |  211.3 MB/s |
+-------------------+------------+-------------+

* dm-clone achieves 1.7 to 2.9 times more write BW than
  dm-snapshot+dm-raid.

* For all region/chunk sizes dm-clone achieves the same write BW as the
  SSD device.

2. Sequential read BW

+-------------------+------------+-------------+
| region/chunk size |  dm-clone  | dm-snapshot |
+-------------------+------------+-------------+
|        4 KB       | 442.8 MB/s |  217.3 MB/s |
|        8 KB       | 443.8 MB/s |  288.8 MB/s |
|       16 KB       | 443.8 MB/s |  275.3 MB/s |
|       32 KB       | 443.8 MB/s |  276.1 MB/s |
|       64 KB       | 443.6 MB/s |  276.1 MB/s |
|       128 KB      | 443.6 MB/s |  275.2 MB/s |
+-------------------+------------+-------------+

* dm-clone achieves 1.5 to 2 times more read BW than
  dm-snapshot+dm-raid.

Metadata/Storage overhead
=========================

dm-clone had a _maximum_ metadata overhead of around 20 MB for all
benchmarks. As dm-clone doesn't require any extra COW space for
temporarily storing the written data (writes just go directly to the
clone device) this is the _only_ storage overhead incurred by dm-clone,
irrespective of the amount of the written data

On the other hand, the COW space utilization of dm-snapshot, for the
bandwidth benchmarks, varied from 11.95 GB to 20.41 GB, depending on the
amount of written data.

I want to emphasize that after the cloning/syncing is complete we have
to merge this multi-gigabyte COW space back to the clone/destination
device. This will cause _further_ performance degradation, which is
_not_ reflected in the above performance measurements, but _will_ be
present in real workloads, if the dm-snapshot based solution is used.


To summarize, dm-clone performs _significantly_ better than a
dm-snapshot based solution, on all aspects (latency, IOPS, BW), and with
a _fraction_ of the storage/metadata overhead.

If you have any more questions, I would be more than happy to discuss
them with you.

Thanks,
Nikos

> On 7/10/19 8:45 PM, Nikos Tsironis wrote:
>> On 7/10/19 12:28 AM, Heinz Mauelshagen wrote:
>>> Hi Nikos,
>e>
>>> what is the crucial factor your target offers vs. resynchronizing such a
>>> latency distinct
>>> 2-legged mirror with a read-write snapshot (local, fast exception store)
>>> on top, tearing the
>>> mirror down keeping the local leg once fully in sync and merging the
>>> snapshot back into it?
>>>
>>> Heinz
>>>
>> Hi Heinz,
>>
>> The most significant benefits of dm-clone over the solution you propose
>> is significantly better performance, no need for extra COW space, no
>> need to merge back a snapshot, and the ability to skip syncing the
>> unused space of a file system.
>>
>> 1. In order to ensure snapshot consistency, dm-snapshot needs to
>>     commit a completed exception, before signaling the completion of the
>>     write that triggered it to upper layers.
>>
>>     The persistent exception store commits exceptions every time a
>>     metadata area is filled or when there are no more exceptions
>>     in-flight. For a 4K chunk size we have 256 exceptions per metadata
>>     area, so the best case scenario is one commit per 256 writes. Here I
>>     assume a write with size equal to the chunk size of dm-snapshot,
>>     e.g., 4K, so there is no COW overhead, and that we write to new
>>     chunks, so we need to allocate new exceptions.
>>
>>     Part of committing the metadata is flushing the cache of the
>>     underlying device, if there is one. We have seen SSDs which can
>>     sustain hundreds of thousands of random write IOPS, but they take up
>>     to 8ms to flush their cache. In such a case, flushing the SSD cache
>>     every few writes significantly degrades performance.
>>
>>     Moreover, dm-snapshot forces exceptions to complete in the order they
>>     were allocated, to avoid snapshot space leak on crash (commit
>>     230c83afdd9cd). This inserts further latency in exception completions
>>     and thus user write completions.
>>
>>     On the other hand, when cloning a device we don't need to be so
>>     strict and can rely on committing the metadata every time a FLUSH or
>>     FUA bio is written, or periodically, like dm-thin and dm-cache do.
>>
>>     dm-clone does exactly that. When a region/chunk is cloned or
>>     over-written by a write, we just set a bit in the relevant in-core
>>     bitmap. The metadata are committed once every second or when we
>>     receive a FLUSH or FUA bio.
>>
>>     This improves performance significantly and results in increased IOPS
>>     and reduced latency, especially in cases where flushing the disk
>>     cache is very expensive.
>>
>> 2. For large devices, e.g. multi terabyte disks, resynchronizing the
>>     local leg can take a lot of time. If the application running over the
>>     local device is write-heavy, dm-snapshot will end up allocating a
>>     large number of exceptions. This increases the number of hash table
>>     collisions and thus increases the time we need to do a hash table
>>     lookup.
>>
>>     dm-snapshot needs to look up the exception hash tables in order to
>>     service an I/O, so this increases latency and degrades performance.
>>
>>     On the other hand, dm-clone is just testing a bit to see if a region
>>     is cloned or not and decides what to do based on that test.
>>
>> 3. With dm-clone there is no need to reserve extra COW space for
>>     temporarily storing the written data, while the clone device is
>>     syncing. Nor would one need to worry about monitoring and expanding
>>     the COW device to prevent it from filling up.
>>
>> 4. With dm-clone there is no need to merge back potentially several
>>     gigabytes once cloning/syncing completes. We also avoid the relevant
>>     performance degradation incurred by the merging process. Writes just
>>     go directly to the clone device.
>>
>> 5. dm-clone implements support for discards, so it can skip
>>     cloning/syncing the relevant regions. In the case of a large block
>>     device which contains a filesystem with empty space, e.g. a 2TB
>>     device containing 500GB of useful data in a filesystem, this can
>>     significantly reduce the time needed to sync/clone.
>>
>> This was a rather long email, but I hope it makes the significant
>> benefits of dm-clone over using dm-snapshot, and our rationale behind
>> the decision to implement a new target clearer.
>>
>> I would be more than happy to continue the conversation and focus on any
>> other questions you may have.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Nikos
> 




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