= Motivation
While dealing with another performance issue (see 126118f) we noticed
that we spend a lot of time in various places in the kernel when
constructing long nvlists. The problem is that when an nvlist is created
with the NV_UNIQUE_NAME set (which is the case most of the time), we do
a linear search through the whole list to ensure uniqueness for every
entry we add.
An example of the above scenario can be seen in the following
flamegraph, where more than have the time of the zfsdev_ioctl() is spent
on constructing nvlists. Flamegraph:
https://sdimitro.github.io/img/flame/sdimitro_snap_unmount3.svg
Adding a table to speed up lookups will help situations where we just
construct an nvlist (like the scenario above), in addition to regular
lookups and removals.
= What this patch does
In this diff we've implemented a hash-table on top of the nvlist code
that converts most nvlist operations from O(# number of entries) to
O(1)* (the start is for amortized time as the hash-table grows and
shrinks depending on the # of entries - plain lookup is strictly O(1)).
= Performance Analysis
To analyze the performance improvement I just used the setup from the
snapshot deletion issue mentioned above in the Motivation section.
Basically I created 10K filesystems with one snapshot each and then I
just used the API of libZFS_Core to pass down an nvlist of all the
snapshots to have them deleted. The reason I used my own driver program
was to have clean performance results of what actually happens in the
kernel. The flamegraphs and wall clock times mentioned below were
gathered from the start to the end of the driver program's run. Between
trials the testpool used was completely destroyed, the system was
rebooted and the testpool was completely recreated. The reason for this
dance was to get consistent results.
== Results (before patch):
=== Sampling Flamegraphs
[Trial 1] https://sdimitro.github.io/img/flame/DLPX-53417/trial-A.svg
[Trial 2] https://sdimitro.github.io/img/flame/DLPX-53417/trial-A2.svg
[Trial 3] https://sdimitro.github.io/img/flame/DLPX-53417/trial-A3.svg
=== Wall clock times (in seconds)
```
[Trial 4]
real 5.3
user 0.4
sys 2.3
[Trial 5]
real 8.2
user 0.4
sys 2.4
[Trial 6]
real 6.0
user 0.5
sys 2.3
```
== Results (after patch):
=== Sampling Flamegraphs
[Trial 1] https://sdimitro.github.io/img/flame/DLPX-53417/trial-Ae.svg
[Trial 2] https://sdimitro.github.io/img/flame/DLPX-53417/trial-A2e.svg
[Trial 3] https://sdimitro.github.io/img/flame/DLPX-53417/trial-A3e.svg
=== Wall clock times (in seconds)
```
[Trial 4]
real 4.9
user 0.0
sys 0.9
[Trial 5]
real 3.8
user 0.0
sys 0.9
[Trial 6]
real 3.6
user 0.0
sys 0.9
```
== Analysis
The results between the trials are consistent so in this sections I will
only talk about the flamegraph results from trial-1 and the wall-clock
results from trial-4.
From trial-1 we can see that zfs_dev_ioctl() goes from 2,331 to 996
samples counts. Specifically, the samples from fnvlist_add_nvlist() and
spa_history_log_nvl() are almost gone (~500 & ~800 to 5 & 5 samples),
leaving zfs_ioc_destroy_snaps() to dominate most samples from
zfs_dev_ioctl().
From trial-4 we see that the user time dropped to 0 secods. I believe
the consistent 0.4 seconds before my patch was applied was due to my
driver program constructing the long nvlist of snapshots so it can pass
it to the kernel. As for the system time, the effect there is more clear
(2.3 down to 0.9 seconds).
Porting Notes:
* DATA_TYPE_DONTCARE case added to switch in fm_nvprintr() and
zpool_do_events_nvprint().
Authored by: Serapheim Dimitropoulos <serapheim.dimitro@delphix.com>
Reviewed by: Matt Ahrens <matt@delphix.com>
Reviewed by: Sebastien Roy <sebastien.roy@delphix.com>
Approved by: Robert Mustacchi <rm@joyent.com>
Ported-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
OpenZFS-issue: https://www.illumos.org/issues/9580
OpenZFS-commit: https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs/commit/b5eca7b1Closes#7748
One of the neat tricks an autoconf style project is capable of
is allow configurion/building in a directory other than the
source directory. The major advantage to this is that you can
build the project various different ways while making changes
in a single source tree.
For example, this project is designed to work on various different
Linux distributions each of which work slightly differently. This
means that changes need to verified on each of those supported
distributions perferably before the change is committed to the
public git repo.
Using nfs and custom build directories makes this much easier.
I now have a single source tree in nfs mounted on several different
systems each running a supported distribution. When I make a
change to the source base I suspect may break things I can
concurrently build from the same source on all the systems each
in their own subdirectory.
wget -c http://github.com/downloads/behlendorf/zfs/zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
tar -xzf zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd zfs-x-y-z
------------------------- run concurrently ----------------------
<ubuntu system> <fedora system> <debian system> <rhel6 system>
mkdir ubuntu mkdir fedora mkdir debian mkdir rhel6
cd ubuntu cd fedora cd debian cd rhel6
../configure ../configure ../configure ../configure
make make make make
make check make check make check make check
This change also moves many of the include headers from individual
incude/sys directories under the modules directory in to a single
top level include directory. This has the advantage of making
the build rules cleaner and logically it makes a bit more sense.
Serapheim Dimitropoulos
Brian Behlendorf
