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Re: [LUG] File system for heavy I/O

 

On 24/03/14 15:49, Martijn Grooten wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 05:48:44PM +0000, Simon Waters wrote:
>> However file system is rarely dominant in IO performance.
>>
>> Sure if everything is perfect, then file system can make a slight
>> difference, but they tend to all try and optimize the common cases.
> 
> Which of course make sense.
> 
> Looks like I'll have to see if I can find some other ways to improve IO
> performance. Such as by yet again looking at my code.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Martijn.
> 
> 


Are you free to rebuild the kernel on the current host? My main
workstation spends most of it's life absolutely battering the disks
which is partly why I eventually had to start building my own.

Amongst others, I pull in this patchset:

https://pf.natalenko.name/

The interesting bit for you is the BFQ IO scheduler to replace the
standard Linux CFQ elevator. BFQ has much better responsiveness under
heavy disk load - there are some benchmarks and explanations here:

http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/

So on my system:

ghost@failbot:~$ !491
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
noop deadline cfq [bfq]

You may benefit even further from noop as an elevator instead,
especially if your server has enough RAM for aggressive caching.

Speaking of RAM, I don't know how big the dataset is that you're hitting
so hard on the server, but is it small enough to be mounted on a RAM
disk? All my compiles take place within a TMPFS that is whipped up on
demand (a trick I originally learnt from temerge vs emerge on Gentoo) by
a script. The performance gains are spectacular, unsurprisingly.

Along with tuning sysctl, etc, there's still a LOT of optimisation that
can be wrung out of your machine yet...

Regards

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