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Date:      Fri, 6 Jun 1997 11:48:02 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
To:        lada@ws6303.gud.siemens.at (Hr.Ladavac)
Cc:        lada@ws6303-f.gud.siemens.co.at, jkh@time.cdrom.com, henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Extremely poor interactive response under heave SCSI load
Message-ID:  <199706060948.LAA01417@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
In-Reply-To: <199706060940.LAA07518@ws6423.gud.siemens.at> from "Hr.Ladavac" at Jun 6, 97 11:39:46 am

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> > I have dnot read the previous messages in this thread so I might be wrong,
> > but it sounds like a fair bw allocation among flows, much the same as
> > you have when you are on a slow ppp link which does not implement priorities,
> > and you run an ftp transfer in parallel with a telnet session.
> > 
> > Solutions exist for this problems, i.e. separate the flows (easy for
> > tcp/udp connections since the headers clearly identify packets) at the
> > bottleneck, and serve the various queues in a round-robin fashion.
> > The network drivers do not work like this because it is unlikely that
> > long queues develops at a 10Mbit/s interface (but they do on a ppp liink,
> > so perhaps this ought to be done in the tun device -- I might work on
> > this in the next months).
> > 
> > A similar approach could be used for scheduling disk writes assuming one
> > has a way to determine which  writes are related. This might not be trivial .
> 
> I wish it were only delayed writes...the reads are delayed as well.

sorry I was thinking in 'network mode' where you don't have explicit
reads...  replace "write" with "request" in my description.

> What might be possible is to change the strategy routine for od driver to give
> reads priority over writes since read is *much* faster than write on a PD.  In
> fact, one could clone the od driver into the pd driver with changed strategy.
> 
> The other possibility is to make FFS give priority to metadata reads in
> comparison to normal reads and writes.  However, I don't know whether that is
> really the problem (no FreeBSD box, as previosly stated ): or if that can be
> done at all.  Sounds non-trivial, though.

both solution sound like hacks, similar to prioritizing interactive
traffic vs. bulk one on a ppp link. And you still have the problem of
classifying requests, which is probably almost as hard as determining
"flows" (i.e. streams of requests generated by the same process).
I have no idea of what information are available at the fs level,
so I will leave some more knowledgeable person the answer.

	Cheers
	Luigi
-----------------------------+--------------------------------------
Luigi Rizzo                  |  Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
email: luigi@iet.unipi.it    |  Universita' di Pisa
tel: +39-50-568533           |  via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy)
fax: +39-50-568522           |  http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/
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