Illumos #4045 write throttle & i/o scheduler performance work

4045 zfs write throttle & i/o scheduler performance work

1. The ZFS i/o scheduler (vdev_queue.c) now divides i/os into 5 classes: sync
read, sync write, async read, async write, and scrub/resilver.  The scheduler
issues a number of concurrent i/os from each class to the device.  Once a class
has been selected, an i/o is selected from this class using either an elevator
algorithem (async, scrub classes) or FIFO (sync classes).  The number of
concurrent async write i/os is tuned dynamically based on i/o load, to achieve
good sync i/o latency when there is not a high load of writes, and good write
throughput when there is.  See the block comment in vdev_queue.c (reproduced
below) for more details.

2. The write throttle (dsl_pool_tempreserve_space() and
txg_constrain_throughput()) is rewritten to produce much more consistent delays
when under constant load.  The new write throttle is based on the amount of
dirty data, rather than guesses about future performance of the system.  When
there is a lot of dirty data, each transaction (e.g. write() syscall) will be
delayed by the same small amount.  This eliminates the "brick wall of wait"
that the old write throttle could hit, causing all transactions to wait several
seconds until the next txg opens.  One of the keys to the new write throttle is
decrementing the amount of dirty data as i/o completes, rather than at the end
of spa_sync().  Note that the write throttle is only applied once the i/o
scheduler is issuing the maximum number of outstanding async writes.  See the
block comments in dsl_pool.c and above dmu_tx_delay() (reproduced below) for
more details.

This diff has several other effects, including:

 * the commonly-tuned global variable zfs_vdev_max_pending has been removed;
use per-class zfs_vdev_*_max_active values or zfs_vdev_max_active instead.

 * the size of each txg (meaning the amount of dirty data written, and thus the
time it takes to write out) is now controlled differently.  There is no longer
an explicit time goal; the primary determinant is amount of dirty data.
Systems that are under light or medium load will now often see that a txg is
always syncing, but the impact to performance (e.g. read latency) is minimal.
Tune zfs_dirty_data_max and zfs_dirty_data_sync to control this.

 * zio_taskq_batch_pct = 75 -- Only use 75% of all CPUs for compression,
checksum, etc.  This improves latency by not allowing these CPU-intensive tasks
to consume all CPU (on machines with at least 4 CPU's; the percentage is
rounded up).

--matt

APPENDIX: problems with the current i/o scheduler

The current ZFS i/o scheduler (vdev_queue.c) is deadline based.  The problem
with this is that if there are always i/os pending, then certain classes of i/
os can see very long delays.

For example, if there are always synchronous reads outstanding, then no async
writes will be serviced until they become "past due".  One symptom of this
situation is that each pass of the txg sync takes at least several seconds
(typically 3 seconds).

If many i/os become "past due" (their deadline is in the past), then we must
service all of these overdue i/os before any new i/os.  This happens when we
enqueue a batch of async writes for the txg sync, with deadlines 2.5 seconds in
the future.  If we can't complete all the i/os in 2.5 seconds (e.g. because
there were always reads pending), then these i/os will become past due.  Now we
must service all the "async" writes (which could be hundreds of megabytes)
before we service any reads, introducing considerable latency to synchronous i/
os (reads or ZIL writes).