Many popular I/O-intensive services or applications spawn or
reactivate many parallel threads/processes during short time
intervals. Examples are systemd during boot or git grep. These
services or applications benefit mostly from a high throughput: the
quicker the I/O generated by their processes is cumulatively served,
the sooner the target job of these services or applications gets
completed. As a consequence, it is almost always counterproductive to
weight-raise any of the queues associated to the processes of these
services or applications: in most cases it would just lower the
throughput, mainly because weight-raising also implies device idling.
To address this issue, an I/O scheduler needs, first, to detect which
queues are associated with these services or applications. In this
respect, we have that, from the I/O-scheduler standpoint, these
services or applications cause bursts of activations, i.e.,
activations of different queues occurring shortly after each
other. However, a shorter burst of activations may be caused also by
the start of an application that does not consist in a lot of parallel
I/O-bound threads (see the comments on the function bfq_handle_burst
for details).
In view of these facts, this commit introduces:
1) an heuristic to detect (only) bursts of queue activations caused by
services or applications consisting in many parallel I/O-bound
threads;
2) the prevention of device idling and weight-raising for the queues
belonging to these bursts.
Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
e1b2324dd0