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1 | CFQ ioscheduler tunables | ||
2 | ======================== | ||
3 | |||
4 | slice_idle | ||
5 | ---------- | ||
6 | This specifies how long CFQ should idle for next request on certain cfq queues | ||
7 | (for sequential workloads) and service trees (for random workloads) before | ||
8 | queue is expired and CFQ selects next queue to dispatch from. | ||
9 | |||
10 | By default slice_idle is a non-zero value. That means by default we idle on | ||
11 | queues/service trees. This can be very helpful on highly seeky media like | ||
12 | single spindle SATA/SAS disks where we can cut down on overall number of | ||
13 | seeks and see improved throughput. | ||
14 | |||
15 | Setting slice_idle to 0 will remove all the idling on queues/service tree | ||
16 | level and one should see an overall improved throughput on faster storage | ||
17 | devices like multiple SATA/SAS disks in hardware RAID configuration. The down | ||
18 | side is that isolation provided from WRITES also goes down and notion of | ||
19 | IO priority becomes weaker. | ||
20 | |||
21 | So depending on storage and workload, it might be useful to set slice_idle=0. | ||
22 | In general I think for SATA/SAS disks and software RAID of SATA/SAS disks | ||
23 | keeping slice_idle enabled should be useful. For any configurations where | ||
24 | there are multiple spindles behind single LUN (Host based hardware RAID | ||
25 | controller or for storage arrays), setting slice_idle=0 might end up in better | ||
26 | throughput and acceptable latencies. | ||
27 | |||
28 | CFQ IOPS Mode for group scheduling | ||
29 | =================================== | ||
30 | Basic CFQ design is to provide priority based time slices. Higher priority | ||
31 | process gets bigger time slice and lower priority process gets smaller time | ||
32 | slice. Measuring time becomes harder if storage is fast and supports NCQ and | ||
33 | it would be better to dispatch multiple requests from multiple cfq queues in | ||
34 | request queue at a time. In such scenario, it is not possible to measure time | ||
35 | consumed by single queue accurately. | ||
36 | |||
37 | What is possible though is to measure number of requests dispatched from a | ||
38 | single queue and also allow dispatch from multiple cfq queue at the same time. | ||
39 | This effectively becomes the fairness in terms of IOPS (IO operations per | ||
40 | second). | ||
41 | |||
42 | If one sets slice_idle=0 and if storage supports NCQ, CFQ internally switches | ||
43 | to IOPS mode and starts providing fairness in terms of number of requests | ||
44 | dispatched. Note that this mode switching takes effect only for group | ||
45 | scheduling. For non-cgroup users nothing should change. | ||