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Good afternoon,</div>
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There was a recent discussion on the lustre-devel mailing list in which I floated removing the 'pio' feature from Lustre. This is a client side i/o parallelization feature (splitting i/o in kernel space & using multiple worker threads) which is off by default
and must be enabled manually with a setting in proc.</div>
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It is not on by default because while it helps performance for some workloads, it harms performance for many other common workloads. I studied making it fit to be on by default some time ago (item #1 would be making sure it did not slow down any common workloads),
and found a fair bit of work to do to make that possible.</div>
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In the time since then, the work to extend the utility of this feature to reads was unsuccessful, and a credible alternate proposal for writes ("write containers", basically simplifying the write path dramatically for sequential i/o, which should be able to
offer similar or larger benefits at a lower cost in CPU usage) has come about.</div>
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I could go on - But I am really wondering this:<br>
Are there any active users of this feature? If so, what's your use case and what's the benefit you see? Keep in mind it must be turned on explicitly, so if you are not familiar with it, it's pretty unlikely you're using it.</div>
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For those who'd like to learn more, I'd refer you to the original bug:</div>
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<a href="https://jira.whamcloud.com/browse/LU-8964" id="LPlnk794702">https://jira.whamcloud.com/browse/LU-8964</a><br>
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My LAD talk from a few years ago:</div>
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<a href="https://www.eofs.eu/_media/events/devsummit17/patrick_farrell_laddevsummit_pio.pdf" id="LPNoLP297312">https://www.eofs.eu/_media/events/devsummit17/patrick_farrell_laddevsummit_pio.pdf</a><br>
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And the recent mailing list discussion:</div>
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<a href="http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-devel-lustre.org/2018-November/thread.html" id="LPlnk347135">http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-devel-lustre.org/2018-November/thread.html</a><br>
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<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><font face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(Look for </span></font><a href="http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-devel-lustre.org/2018-November/008210.html" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: medium; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[PATCH
10/12] lustre: clio: Introduce parallel tasks framework</span></font><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: medium; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span></a><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">, and for my comments
specifically)</font></div>
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<li style=""><font color="#000000" face="Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Patrick</font></li></ul>
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