RE: effective_io_concurrency and NVMe devices

Hi Tomas,

> > I have a machine here with 1 x PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and also 1 x PCIe 4.0
> > NVMe SSD. I ran a few tests to see how different values of
> > effective_io_concurrency would affect performance. I tried to come up
> > with a query that did little enough CPU processing to ensure that I/O
> > was the clear bottleneck.
> >
> > The test was with a 128GB table on a machine with 64GB of RAM. I
> > padded the tuples out so there were 4 per page so that the aggregation
> > didn't have much work to do.
> >
> > The query I ran was: explain (analyze, buffers, timing off) select
> > count(p) from r where a = 1;

> The other idea I had while looking at batching a while back, is that we should
> batch the prefetches. The current logic interleaves prefetches with other work -
> prefetch one page, process one page, ... But once reading a page gets
> sufficiently fast, this means the queues never get deep enough for
> optimizations. So maybe we should think about batching the prefetches, in some
> way. Unfortunately posix_fadvise does not allow batching of requests, but we
> can at least stop interleaving the requests.

.. for now it doesn't, but IORING_OP_FADVISE is on the long-term horizon.

> The attached patch is a trivial version that waits until we're at least
> 32 pages behind the target, and then prefetches all of them. Maybe give it a try?
> (This pretty much disables prefetching for e_i_c below 32, but for an
> experimental patch that's enough.)

I've tried it at e_i_c=10 initially on David's setup.sql, and most defaults s_b=128MB, dbsize=8kb but with forced disabled parallel query (for easier inspection with strace just to be sure//so please don't compare times).

run:
a) master (e_i_c=10) 181760ms, 185680ms, 185384ms @ ~ 340MB/s and 44k IOPS (~122k IOPS practical max here for libaio)
b) patched(e_i_c=10) 237774ms, 236326ms, ..as you stated it disabled prefetching, fadvise() not occurring
c) patched(e_i_c=128) 90430ms, 88354ms, 85446ms, 78475ms, 74983ms, 81432ms (mean=83186ms +/- 5947ms) @ ~570MB/s and 75k IOPS (it even peaked for a second on ~122k)
d) master (e_i_c=128) 116865ms, 101178ms, 89529ms, 95024ms, 89942ms 99939ms (mean=98746ms +/- 10118ms) @ ~510MB/s and 65k IOPS (rare peaks to 90..100k IOPS)

~16% benefit sounds good (help me understand: L1i cache?). Maybe it is worth throwing that patch onto more advanced / complete performance test farm too ? (although it's only for bitmap heap scans)

run a: looked interleaved as you said:
fadvise64(160, 1064157184, 8192, POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED) = 0
pread64(160, "@\0\0\0\200\303/_\0\0\4\0(\0\200\0\0 \4 \0\0\0\0 \230\300\17(at)\220\300\17"..., 8192, 1064009728) = 8192
fadvise64(160, 1064173568, 8192, POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED) = 0
pread64(160, "@\0\0\0\0\0040_\0\0\4\0(\0\200\0\0 \4 \0\0\0\0 \230\300\17(at)\220\300\17"..., 8192, 1064026112) = 8192
[..]

BTW: interesting note, for run b, the avgrq-sz from extended iostat jumps is flipping between 16(*512=8kB) to ~256(*512=~128kB!) as if kernel was doing some own prefetching heuristics on and off in cycles, while when calling e_i_c/fadvise() is in action then it seems to be always 8kB requests. So with disabled fadivse() one IMHO might have problems deterministically benchmarking short queries as kernel voodoo might be happening (?)

-J.