lighty's life: more threaded io

more threaded io

jan — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 12:01:00 +0100

After a long night we finally have everything in place for a threaded stat() calls. Not only that, we also have a new network backend for all those platforms which have problems with the posix-aio on. You need to have glib2-2.6.0 or higher installed.

The new options are:

server.max-stat-threads = 4
server.max-write-threads = 8
server.network-backend = "gthread-aio"

Depending on the backend, your OS and the number of disks you might want to raise the two values, but keep in mind that you will get problems if you raise them too much. Performance will decrease again at a given point.

The performance of the different backends is: linux-aio-sendfile, posix-aio, gthread-aio, ...

On the way linux-aio-sendfile and posix-aio should behave better under high concurrent load now. They even got some stats:

server.io.linux-aio.async-read: 1261
server.io.linux-aio.sync-read: 551

Time for benchmarks, check my earlier article about lighty-1-5-0-and-linux-aio and try to generate the same set of testfiles and take http_load to generate random load. It is important that you use more files then you can cache in memory.

"more threaded io" by Jan Kneschke

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:05:08 +0100

I benchmarked it now with 10k files and got 1.8MByte/s with async-read() and 800kbyte/s with sync-read. I lowered the threshold to 4kbyte. That should match the size of the bytes that we got with the read-ahead from the stat() call. ...

"more threaded io" by Jürgen Herz

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:07:44 +0100

Being just an interested amateur I don't have the hardware to do benchmarks myself. But I'm very curious in the improvements regarding aio and threaded stat(). Though not concerning the latter I'd like to know something about the impact on performance of the new 16k lower limit for aio. So I'm particularly interested in benchmarking static delivery throughoutput with files of 16383 bytes in one run and files of 16385 bytes in another run.

"more threaded io" by Jan Kneschke

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 00:54:22 +0100

We are moving www.lighttpd.net to this host and are waiting for the DNS to be updated. The old host got already disabled. Bad timing from my side.

"more threaded io" by Curt

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 18:49:57 +0100

http://lighttpd.net is down (1:48 PM EST, Friday, Feb 2). Does anyone know how to contact an adminstrator? Thank you.

"more threaded io" by tbone

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 21:22:19 +0100

Jan, I'll try to get some benchs this weekend for you using a large number of disks in a situation similar to how we'd be running it live (ie. millions of small (10k) files).

"more threaded io" by Pedro Melo

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 17:07:43 +0100

In a future kernel, you might find this interesting: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0701.3/2165.html