== Summary ==
Prior to this change, sync writes to a zvol are processed serially.
This commit makes zvols process concurrently outstanding sync writes in
parallel, similar to how reads and async writes are already handled.
The result is that the throughput of sync writes is tripled.
== Background ==
When a write comes in for a zvol (e.g. over iscsi), it is processed by
calling `zvol_request()` to initiate the operation. ZFS is expected to
later call `BIO_END_IO()` when the operation completes (possibly from a
different thread). There are a limited number of threads that are
available to call `zvol_request()` - one one per iscsi client (unless
using MC/S). Therefore, to ensure good performance, the latency of
`zvol_request()` is important, so that many i/o operations to the zvol
can be processed concurrently. In other words, if the client has
multiple outstanding requests to the zvol, the zvol should have multiple
outstanding requests to the storage hardware (i.e. issue multiple
concurrent `zio_t`'s).
For reads, and async writes (i.e. writes which can be acknowledged
before the data reaches stable storage), `zvol_request()` achieves low
latency by dispatching the bulk of the work (including waiting for i/o
to disk) to a taskq. The taskq callback (`zvol_read()` or
`zvol_write()`) blocks while waiting for the i/o to disk to complete.
The `zvol_taskq` has 32 threads (by default), so we can have up to 32
concurrent i/os to disk in service of requests to zvols.
However, for sync writes (i.e. writes which must be persisted to stable
storage before they can be acknowledged, by calling `zil_commit()`),
`zvol_request()` does not use `zvol_taskq`. Instead it blocks while
waiting for the ZIL write to disk to complete. This has the effect of
serializing sync writes to each zvol. In other words, each zvol will
only process one sync write at a time, waiting for it to be written to
the ZIL before accepting the next request.
The same issue applies to FLUSH operations, for which `zvol_request()`
calls `zil_commit()` directly.
== Description of change ==
This commit changes `zvol_request()` to use
`taskq_dispatch_ent(zvol_taskq)` for sync writes, and FLUSh operations.
Therefore we can have up to 32 threads (the taskq threads)
simultaneously calling `zil_commit()`, for a theoretical performance
improvement of up to 32x.
To avoid the locking issue described in the comment (which this commit
removes), we acquire the rangelock from the taskq callback (e.g.
`zvol_write()`) rather than from `zvol_request()`. This applies to all
writes (sync and async), reads, and discard operations. This means that
multiple simultaneously-outstanding i/o's which access the same block
can complete in any order. This was previously thought to be incorrect,
but a review of the block device interface requirements revealed that
this is fine - the order is inherently not defined. The shorter hold
time of the rangelock should also have a slight performance improvement.
For an additional slight performance improvement, we use
`taskq_dispatch_ent()` instead of `taskq_dispatch()`, which avoids a
`kmem_alloc()` and eliminates a failure mode. This applies to all
writes (sync and async), reads, and discard operations.
== Performance results ==
We used a zvol as an iscsi target (server) for a Windows initiator
(client), with a single connection (the default - i.e. not MC/S).
We used `diskspd` to generate a workload with 4 threads, doing 1MB
writes to random offsets in the zvol. Without this change we get
231MB/s, and with the change we get 728MB/s, which is 3.15x the original
performance.
We ran a real-world workload, restoring a MSSQL database, and saw
throughput 2.5x the original.
We saw more modest performance wins (typically 1.5x-2x) when using MC/S
with 4 connections, and with different number of client threads (1, 8,
32).
Reviewed-by: Tony Nguyen <tony.nguyen@delphix.com>
Reviewed-by: Pavel Zakharov <pavel.zakharov@delphix.com>
Reviewed-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Signed-off-by: Matthew Ahrens <mahrens@delphix.com>
Closes#10163
0929c4de39