[Dovecot] Scalability plans: Abstract out filesystem and make it someone else's problem

[Stan Hoeppner]

Timo Sirainen put forth on 3/10/2010 3:19 PM:
> On 10.8.2009, at 20.01, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> 
>> (3.5. Implement async I/O filesystem backend.)
> 
> You know what I found out today? Linux doesn't support async IO for regular buffered files. I had heard there were issues, but I thought it was mainly about some annoying APIs and such. Anyone know if some project has successfully figured out some usable way to do async disk IO? The possibilities seem to be:
> 
> a) Use Linux's native AIO, which requires direct-io for files. This *might* not be horribly bad for mail files. After all, same mail is rarely read multiple times. Except when parsing its headers first and then its body. Maybe the process could do some internal buffering?..
> 
> I guess no one ever tried my posix_fadvise() patch? The idea was that it would tell the kernel after closing a mail file that it's no longer needed in memory, so kernel could remove it from page cache. I never heard any positive or negative comments about how it affected performance.. http://dovecot.org/patches/1.1/fadvise.diff
> 
> b) Use threads, either via some library or implement yourself. Each thread of course uses some extra memory. Also enabling threads causes glibc to start using a thread-safe version of malloc() (I think?), which slows things down (unless that can be avoided, maybe by using clone() directly instead of pthreads?).
> 
> c) I read someone's idea about using posix_fadvise() and fincore() functions to somehow make it "kind of work, usually, maybe". I'm not sure if there's a practical way to make them work though. And of course I don't think fincore() has even been accepted by Linus yet.
> 

Considering the extent to which Linus hates O_DIRECT, I would think if he
was a fan of Async I/O at all, he'd have pushed its use via the buffer
cache.  Given that Async I/O is implemented via O_DIRECT I'd say Linus isn't
a fan of Async I/O either.  I've not read anything Linus has written on
Async I/O, if he even has, I'm merely making an educated guess based on the
current implementation of Async I/O in Linux.

-- 
Stan