On Dec 5, 2012, at 7:46 AM, Matt Van Mater <matt.vanma...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't have anything significant to add to this conversation, but wanted to 
> chime in that I also find the concept of a QOS-like capability very appealing 
> and that Jim's recent emails resonate with me.  You're not alone!  I believe 
> there are many use cases where a granular prioritization that controls how 
> ARC, L2ARC, ZIL and underlying vdevs are used to give priority IO to a 
> specific zvol, share, etc would be useful.  My experience is stronger in the 
> networking side and I envision a weighted class based queuing methodology (or 
> something along those lines).  I recognize that ZFS's architecture preference 
> for coalescing writes and reads into larger sequential batches might conflict 
> with a QOS-like capability... Perhaps the ARC/L2ARC tuning might be a good 
> starting point towards that end?

At present, I do not see async write QoS as being interesting. That leaves sync 
writes and reads
as the managed I/O. Unfortunately, with HDDs, the variance in response time >> 
queue management
time, so the results are less useful than the case with SSDs. Control theory 
works, once again.
For sync writes, they are often latency-sensitive and thus have the highest 
priority. Reads have
lower priority, with prefetch reads at lower priority still.

> 
> On a related note (maybe?) I would love to see pool-wide settings that 
> control how aggressively data is added/removed form ARC, L2ARC, etc.

Evictions are done on an as-needed basis. Why would you want to evict more than 
needed?
So you could fetch it again?

Prefetching can be more aggressive, but we actually see busy systems disabling 
prefetch to 
improve interactive performance. Queuing theory works, once again.

>  Something that would accelerate the warming of a cold pool of storage or be 
> more aggressive in adding/removing cached data on a volatile dataset (e.g. 
> where Virtual Machines are turned on/off frequently).  I have heard that some 
> of these defaults might be changed in some future release of Illumos, but 
> haven't seen any specifics saying that the idea is nearing fruition in 
> release XYZ.

It is easy to warm data (dd), even to put it into MRU (dd + dd). For best 
performance with
VMs, MRU works extremely well, especially with clones.

There are plenty of good ideas being kicked around here, but remember that to 
support
things like QoS at the application level, the applications must be written to 
an interface
that passes QoS hints all the way down the stack. Lacking these interfaces, 
means that
QoS needs to be managed by hand... and that management effort must be worth the 
effort.
 -- richard

> 
> Matt
> 
> 
> On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Jim Klimov <jimkli...@cos.ru> wrote:
> On 2012-11-29 10:56, Jim Klimov wrote:
> For example, I might want to have corporate webshop-related
> databases and appservers to be the fastest storage citizens,
> then some corporate CRM and email, then various lower priority
> zones and VMs, and at the bottom of the list - backups.
> 
> On a side note, I'm now revisiting old ZFS presentations collected
> over the years, and one suggested as "TBD" statements the ideas
> that metaslabs with varying speeds could be used for specific
> tasks, and not only to receive the allocations first so that a new
> pool would perform quickly. I.e. "TBD: Workload specific freespace
> selection policies".
> 
> Say, I create a new storage box and lay out some bulk file, backup
> and database datasets. Even as they are receiving their first bytes,
> I have some idea about the kind of performance I'd expect from them -
> with QoS per dataset I might destine the databases to the fast LBAs
> (and smaller seeks between tracks I expect to use frequently), and
> the bulk data onto slower tracks right from the start, and the rest
> of unspecified data would grow around the middle of the allocation
> range.
> 
> These types of data would then only "creep" onto the less fitting
> metaslabs (faster for bulk, slower for DB) if the target ones run
> out of free space. Then the next-best-fitting would be used...
> 
> This one idea is somewhat reminiscent of hierarchical storage
> management, except that it is about static allocation at the
> write-time and takes place within the single disk (or set of
> similar disks), in order to warrant different performance for
> different tasks.
> 
> ///Jim
> 
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--

richard.ell...@richardelling.com
+1-760-896-4422









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