The read bandwidth of an N-way mirror can by increased by 50%,
and the IOPs by 10%, by more carefully selecting the preferred
leaf vdev.
The existing algorthm selects a perferred leaf vdev based on
offset of the zio request modulo the number of members in the
mirror. It assumes the drives are of equal performance and
that spreading the requests randomly over both drives will be
sufficient to saturate them. In practice this results in the
leaf vdevs being under utilized.
Utilization can be improved by preferentially selecting the leaf
vdev with the least pending IO. This prevents leaf vdevs from
being starved and compensates for performance differences between
disks in the mirror. Faster vdevs will be sent more work and
the mirror performance will not be limitted by the slowest drive.
In the common case where all the pending queues are full and there
is no single least busy leaf vdev a batching stratagy is employed.
Of the N least busy vdevs one is selected with equal probability
to be the preferred vdev for T microseconds. Compared to randomly
selecting a vdev to break the tie batching the requests greatly
improves the odds of merging the requests in the Linux elevator.
The testing results show a significant performance improvement
for all four workloads tested. The workloads were generated
using the fio benchmark and are as follows.
1) 1MB sequential reads from 16 threads to 16 files (MB/s).
2) 4KB sequential reads from 16 threads to 16 files (MB/s).
3) 1MB random reads from 16 threads to 16 files (IOP/s).
4) 4KB random reads from 16 threads to 16 files (IOP/s).
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