When I test fio script with big I/O depth, I found the total throughput drops
compared to some relative small I/O depth. The reason is the thread accumulates
big requests in its plug list and causes some delays (surely this depends
on CPU speed).
I thought we'd better have a threshold for requests. When a threshold reaches,
this means there is no request merge and queue lock contention isn't severe
when pushing per-task requests to queue, so the main advantages of blk plug
don't exist. We can force a plug list flush in this case.
With this, my test throughput actually increases and almost equals to small
I/O depth. Another side effect is irq off time decreases in blk_flush_plug_list()
for big I/O depth.
The BLK_MAX_REQUEST_COUNT is choosen arbitarily, but 16 is efficiently to
reduce lock contention to me. But I'm open here, 32 is ok in my test too.
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
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