readahead: enforce full sync mmap readahead size
Now that we do readahead for sequential mmap reads, here is a simple
evaluation of the impacts, and one further optimization.
It's an NFS-root debian desktop system, readahead size = 60 pages.
The numbers are grabbed after a fresh boot into console.
approach pgmajfault RA miss ratio mmap IO count avg IO size(pages)
A 383 31.6% 383 11
B 225 32.4% 390 11
C 224 32.6% 307 13
case A: mmap sync/async readahead disabled
case B: mmap sync/async readahead enabled, with enforced full async readahead size
case C: mmap sync/async readahead enabled, with enforced full sync/async readahead size
or:
A = vanilla 2.6.30-rc1
B = A plus mmap readahead
C = B plus this patch
The numbers show that
- there are good possibilities for random mmap reads to trigger readahead
- 'pgmajfault' is reduced by 1/3, due to the _async_ nature of readahead
- case C can further reduce IO count by 1/4
- readahead miss ratios are not quite affected
The theory is
- readahead is _good_ for clustered random reads, and can perform
_better_ than readaround because they could be _async_.
- async readahead size is guaranteed to be larger than readaround
size, and they are _async_, hence will mostly behave better
However for B
- sync readahead size could be smaller than readaround size, hence may
make things worse by produce more smaller IOs
which will be fixed by this patch.
Final conclusion:
- mmap readahead reduced major faults by 1/3 and no obvious overheads;
- mmap io can be further reduced by 1/4 with this patch.
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed