readahead: enforce full sync mmap readahead size
Now that we do readahead for sequential mmap reads, here is a simple evaluation of the impacts, and one further optimization. It's an NFS-root debian desktop system, readahead size = 60 pages. The numbers are grabbed after a fresh boot into console. approach pgmajfault RA miss ratio mmap IO count avg IO size(pages) A 383 31.6% 383 11 B 225 32.4% 390 11 C 224 32.6% 307 13 case A: mmap sync/async readahead disabled case B: mmap sync/async readahead enabled, with enforced full async readahead size case C: mmap sync/async readahead enabled, with enforced full sync/async readahead size or: A = vanilla 2.6.30-rc1 B = A plus mmap readahead C = B plus this patch The numbers show that - there are good possibilities for random mmap reads to trigger readahead - 'pgmajfault' is reduced by 1/3, due to the _async_ nature of readahead - case C can further reduce IO count by 1/4 - readahead miss ratios are not quite affected The theory is - readahead is _good_ for clustered random reads, and can perform _better_ than readaround because they could be _async_. - async readahead size is guaranteed to be larger than readaround size, and they are _async_, hence will mostly behave better However for B - sync readahead size could be smaller than readaround size, hence may make things worse by produce more smaller IOs which will be fixed by this patch. Final conclusion: - mmap readahead reduced major faults by 1/3 and no obvious overheads; - mmap io can be further reduced by 1/4 with this patch. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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