Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v1 00/17] dataplane: optimization and multi virtqueue support

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 06.08.2014 um 11:37 hat Ming Lei geschrieben:
> On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Kevin Wolf <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Am 06.08.2014 um 07:33 hat Ming Lei geschrieben:
> >> Hi Kevin,
> >>
> >> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 10:47 PM, Kevin Wolf <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> > Am 05.08.2014 um 15:48 hat Stefan Hajnoczi geschrieben:
> >> >> I have been wondering how to prove that the root cause is the ucontext
> >> >> coroutine mechanism (stack switching).  Here is an idea:
> >> >>
> >> >> Hack your "bypass" code path to run the request inside a coroutine.
> >> >> That way you can compare "bypass without coroutine" against "bypass with
> >> >> coroutine".
> >> >>
> >> >> Right now I think there are doubts because the bypass code path is
> >> >> indeed a different (and not 100% correct) code path.  So this approach
> >> >> might prove that the coroutines are adding the overhead and not
> >> >> something that you bypassed.
> >> >
> >> > My doubts aren't only that the overhead might not come from the
> >> > coroutines, but also whether any coroutine-related overhead is really
> >> > unavoidable. If we can optimise coroutines, I'd strongly prefer to do
> >> > just that instead of introducing additional code paths.
> >>
> >> OK, thank you for taking look at the problem, and hope we can
> >> figure out the root cause, :-)
> >>
> >> >
> >> > Another thought I had was this: If the performance difference is indeed
> >> > only coroutines, then that is completely inside the block layer and we
> >> > don't actually need a VM to test it. We could instead have something
> >> > like a simple qemu-img based benchmark and should be observing the same.
> >>
> >> Even it is simpler to run a coroutine-only benchmark, and I just
> >> wrote a raw one, and looks coroutine does decrease performance
> >> a lot, please see the attachment patch, and thanks for your template
> >> to help me add the 'co_bench' command in qemu-img.
> >
> > Yes, we can look at coroutines microbenchmarks in isolation. I actually
> > did do that yesterday with the yield test from tests/test-coroutine.c.
> > And in fact profiling immediately showed something to optimise:
> > pthread_getspecific() was quite high, replacing it by __thread on
> > systems where it works is more efficient and helped the numbers a bit.
> > Also, a lot of time seems to be spent in pthread_mutex_lock/unlock (even
> > in qemu-img bench), maybe there's even something that can be done here.
> 
> The lock/unlock in dataplane is often from memory_region_find(), and Paolo
> should have done lots of work on that.
> 
> >
> > However, I just wasn't sure whether a change on this level would be
> > relevant in a realistic environment. This is the reason why I wanted to
> > get a benchmark involving the block layer and some I/O.
> >
> >> From the profiling data in below link:
> >>
> >>     http://pastebin.com/YwH2uwbq
> >>
> >> With coroutine, the running time for same loading is increased
> >> ~50%(1.325s vs. 0.903s), and dcache load events is increased
> >> ~35%(693M vs. 512M), insns per cycle is decreased by ~50%(
> >> 1.35 vs. 1.63), compared with bypassing coroutine(-b parameter).
> >>
> >> The bypass code in the benchmark is very similar with the approach
> >> used in the bypass patch, since linux-aio with O_DIRECT seldom
> >> blocks in the the kernel I/O path.
> >>
> >> Maybe the benchmark is a bit extremely, but given modern storage
> >> device may reach millions of IOPS, and it is very easy to slow down
> >> the I/O by coroutine.
> >
> > I think in order to optimise coroutines, such benchmarks are fair game.
> > It's just not guaranteed that the effects are exactly the same on real
> > workloads, so we should take the results with a grain of salt.
> >
> > Anyhow, the coroutine version of your benchmark is buggy, it leaks all
> > coroutines instead of exiting them, so it can't make any use of the
> > coroutine pool. On my laptop, I get this (where fixed coroutine is a
> > version that simply removes the yield at the end):
> >
> >                 | bypass        | fixed coro    | buggy coro
> > ----------------+---------------+---------------+--------------
> > time            | 1.09s         | 1.10s         | 1.62s
> > L1-dcache-loads | 921,836,360   | 932,781,747   | 1,298,067,438
> > insns per cycle | 2.39          | 2.39          | 1.90
> >
> > Begs the question whether you see a similar effect on a real qemu and
> > the coroutine pool is still not big enough? With correct use of
> > coroutines, the difference seems to be barely measurable even without
> > any I/O involved.
> 
> When I comment qemu_coroutine_yield(), looks result of
> bypass and fixed coro is very similar as your test, and I am just
> wondering if stack is always switched in qemu_coroutine_enter()
> without calling qemu_coroutine_yield().

Yes, definitely. qemu_coroutine_enter() always involves calling
qemu_coroutine_switch(), which is the stack switch.

> Without the yield, the benchmark can't emulate coroutine usage in
> bdrv_aio_readv/writev() path any more, and bypass in the patchset
> skips two qemu_coroutine_enter() and one qemu_coroutine_yield()
> for each bdrv_aio_readv/writev().

It's not completely comparable anyway because you're not going through a
main loop and callbacks from there for your benchmark.

But fair enough: Keep the yield, but enter the coroutine twice then. You
get slightly worse results then, but that's more like doubling the very
small difference between "bypass" and "fixed coro" (1.11s / 946,434,327
/ 2.37), not like the horrible performance of the buggy version.

Actually, that's within the error of measurement for time and
insns/cycle, so running it for a bit longer:

                | bypass    | coro      | + yield   | buggy coro
----------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------------
time            | 21.45s    | 21.68s    | 21.83s    | 97.05s
L1-dcache-loads | 18,049 M  | 18,387 M  | 18,618 M  | 26,062 M
insns per cycle | 2.42      | 2.40      | 2.41      | 1.75

> >> > I played a bit with the following, I hope it's not too naive. I couldn't
> >> > see a difference with your patches, but at least one reason for this is
> >> > probably that my laptop SSD isn't fast enough to make the CPU the
> >> > bottleneck. Haven't tried ramdisk yet, that would probably be the next
> >> > thing. (I actually wrote the patch up just for some profiling on my own,
> >> > not for comparing throughput, but it should be usable for that as well.)
> >>
> >> This might not be good for the test since it is basically a sequential
> >> read test, which can be optimized a lot by kernel. And I always use
> >> randread benchmark.
> >
> > Yes, I shortly pondered whether I should implement random offsets
> > instead. But then I realised that a quicker kernel operation would only
> > help the benchmark because we want it to test the CPU consumption in
> > userspace. So the faster the kernel gets, the better for us, because it
> > should make the impact of coroutines bigger.
> 
> OK, I will compare coroutine vs. bypass-co with the benchmark.

Ok, thanks.

Kevin