swap: add block io poll in swapin path
For fast flash disk, async IO could introduce overhead because of
context switch. block-mq now supports IO poll, which improves
performance and latency a lot. swapin is a good place to use this
technique, because the task is waiting for the swapin page to continue
execution.
In my virtual machine, directly read 4k data from a NVMe with iopoll is
about 60% better than that without poll. With iopoll support in swapin
patch, my microbenchmark (a task does random memory write) is about
10%~25% faster. CPU utilization increases a lot though, 2x and even 3x
CPU utilization. This will depend on disk speed.
While iopoll in swapin isn't intended for all usage cases, it's a win
for latency sensistive workloads with high speed swap disk. block layer
has knob to control poll in runtime. If poll isn't enabled in block
layer, there should be no noticeable change in swapin.
I got a chance to run the same test in a NVMe with DRAM as the media.
In simple fio IO test, blkpoll boosts 50% performance in single thread
test and ~20% in 8 threads test. So this is the base line. In above
swap test, blkpoll boosts ~27% performance in single thread test.
blkpoll uses 2x CPU time though.
If we enable hybid polling, the performance gain has very slight drop
but CPU time is only 50% worse than that without blkpoll. Also we can
adjust parameter of hybid poll, with it, the CPU time penality is
reduced further. In 8 threads test, blkpoll doesn't help though. The
performance is similar to that without blkpoll, but cpu utilization is
similar too. There is lock contention in swap path. The cpu time
spending on blkpoll isn't high. So overall, blkpoll swapin isn't worse
than that without it.
The swapin readahead might read several pages in in the same time and
form a big IO request. Since the IO will take longer time, it doesn't
make sense to do poll, so the patch only does iopoll for single page
swapin.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/070c3c3e40b711e7b1390002c991e86a-b5408f0@7511894063d3764ff01ea8111f5a004d7dd700ed078797c204a24e620ddb965c
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@intel.com>
Cc: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
5 files changed
