[GSOC] HAMMER2 compression feature week7 report

[Samuel J. Greear]

Nice work!

Regarding the performance chart and testing so far, it's nice to know that
the cpu overhead is well-bounded and these small tests likely worked well
for simply making sure everything worked, but I wouldn't spend much/any
time on this type of testing going forward, since these microbenchmarks
only show cached performance -- the compressed numbers will basically
always look like a net loss here (albeit it looks like a small one, which
is good) -- the real numbers of interest are going to be performance of
uncached benchmarks / benchmarks that cause a lot of real disk i/o. As you
make it stable I would move onto things like fsstress, blogbench, bonnie,
etc.

If the code is stable enough I would be interested to hear what the
performance delta is between a pair of dd if=/dev/zero bs=64k count=5000 or
similar (as long as its much bigger than RAM) with zero-compression on vs
off. In theory it should look similar to the delta between cached io and
uncached io.

Sam

On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Daniel Flores <daniel5555 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> here is my report for week 7.
>
> This week I had to create a new VM for DragonFly. This new VM has
> different settings and works faster than the previous one. So, since all my
> work and tests will be done on that new VM, it won't be possible to
> directly compare new results with the results obtained in previous tests on
> old VM.
>
> Now, as for work done this week, the code was cleaned up significantly and
> optimized a bit too. This affected mostly write path, since most of new
> code was there. More specifically, the write path now looks like this:
>
> We have hammer2_write_file() function that contains all the code that is
> shared among 3 possible options for write path – no compression,
> zero-cheking and LZ4 compression. At the end of the function where paths
> start to differ depending on selected option, it simply determines the
> option and calls one of 3 functions: hammer2_compress_and_write()
> (corresponds to LZ4 compression), hammer2_zero_check_and_write()
> (corresponds to zero-checking option) and hammer2_just_write() (no
> compression or zero-checking). Those functions do everything necessary to
> finish the write path.
>
> hammer2_just_write() mostly contains the code that was previously in the
> end of hammer2_write_file() function.
>
> hammer2_zero_check_and_write() is a very simple function that checks if
> the block to be written contains only zeros with a specific function called
> not_zero_filled_block() and calls, if necessary, another function called
> zero_check() that deals with the zero-filled block. If the block is not
> zero-filled, the function calls hammer2_just_write().
>
> hammer2_compress_and_write() is the most complex function that performs
> the compression and then writes the block, the compressed version if the
> compression was successful and the original version if it wasn't. It also
> uses not_zero_filled_block() and zero_check() for zero-filled block case.
>
> There are also small improvements, such as that now we use
> obcache_create() instead of obcache_create_simple().
>
> What I'll do now is exhaustively test the code to ensure that it is
> stable. Right now it is not, because we still have a certain bug that
> provokes file corruption while reading and the system crash under certain
> circumstances. I'll be working on fixing that next week. Also there are a
> couple of enhancements for write path such as detecting the incompressible
> files and not trying to compress them on which I'll be working as well. I
> also expect that, probably, some other bugs will be found in process of
> testing.
>
> Now a bit on tests... Earlier this week I was asked to test the
> performance on small files. The testing methodology was exactly the same as
> the one I employed in tests from previous week's report. For testing I used
> 5 files in total:
>
> 1 .jpg (incompressible) – roughly 62KB In size.
> 1 small log file (perfectly compressible) – 62KB in size.
> 1 .png (incompressible) – roughly 2KB in size.
> 1 very small log file (perfectly compressible) – 2 KB in size.
> 1 even smaller log file – 512B in size. I didn't use an incompressible
> file, because all files of that size or smaller are embedded directly into
> an inode, so their path is the same.
>
> For the group test, the same files were copied 20 times per test.
>
> The results are summarized in this table [1].
>
> Basically, it looks like for such small files there is no detectable
> difference in performance. It should be noted that the average seek time on
> modern hard drives is about 0.009 s, so at this rate other factors are more
> important for performance than the path used. It also should be noted that
> currently the write path with compression tries to compress the whole
> logical block even if the file is smaller than this block, but this doesn't
> seem to affect the performance on a scale of single file.
>
> On other hand, when the total size is large enough, like 2.5MB in this
> case, it appears that the difference starts to be perceivable.
>
> My code is available, as usually, in my leaf, branch “hammer2_LZ4” [2].
> I'll appreciate any comments, feedback and criticism.
>
>
> Daniel
>
> [1]
> http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~iostream/performance_table_small_files.html
> [2] git://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~iostream/dragonfly.git
>
>
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