While testing with my buffer read fio jobs[1], I find that btrfs does not
perform well enough.
Here is a scenario in fio jobs:
We have 4 threads, "t1 t2 t3 t4", starting to buffer read a same file,
and all of them will race on add_to_page_cache_lru(), and if one thread
successfully puts its page into the page cache, it takes the responsibility
to read the page's data.
And what's more, reading a page needs a period of time to finish, in which
other threads can slide in and process rest pages:
t1 t2 t3 t4
add Page1
read Page1 add Page2
| read Page2 add Page3
| | read Page3 add Page4
| | | read Page4
-----|------------|-----------|-----------|--------
v v v v
bio bio bio bio
Now we have four bios, each of which holds only one page since we need to
maintain consecutive pages in bio. Thus, we can end up with far more bios
than we need.
Here we're going to
a) delay the real read-page section and
b) try to put more pages into page cache.
With that said, we can make each bio hold more pages and reduce the number
of bios we need.
Here is some numbers taken from fio results:
w/o patch w patch
------------- -------- ---------------
READ: 745MB/s +25% 934MB/s