With the thread pool disabled, we add the requests in the queue to a
GList, processing by iterating over there afterwards.
For adding them, we're using "g_list_prepend()", which is more
efficient but causes the requests to be processed in reverse order,
breaking the read-ahead and request-merging optimizations in the host
for sequential operations.
According to the documentation, if you need to process the request
in-order, using "g_list_prepend()" and then reversing the list with
"g_list_reverse()" is more efficient than using "g_list_append()", so
let's do it that way.
Testing on a spinning disk (to boost the increase of read-ahead and
request-merging) shows a 4x improvement on sequential write fio test:
Test:
fio --directory=/mnt/virtio-fs --filename=fio-file1 --runtime=20
--iodepth=16 --size=4G --direct=1 --blocksize=4K --ioengine libaio
--rw write --name seqwrite-libaio
Without "g_list_reverse()":
...
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [W(1)][100.0%][w=22.4MiB/s][w=5735 IOPS][eta 00m:00s]
seqwrite-libaio: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=710: Tue Aug 24 12:58:16 2021
write: IOPS=5709, BW=22.3MiB/s (23.4MB/s)(446MiB/20002msec); 0 zone resets
...
With "g_list_reverse()":
...
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [W(1)][100.0%][w=84.0MiB/s][w=21.5k IOPS][eta 00m:00s]
seqwrite-libaio: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=716: Tue Aug 24 13:00:15 2021
write: IOPS=21.3k, BW=83.1MiB/s (87.2MB/s)(1663MiB/20001msec); 0 zone resets
...
Signed-off-by: Sergio Lopez <slp@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20210824131158.39970-1-slp@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Dr. David Alan Gilbert <dgilbert@redhat.com>
046d91c83c