Found a great article about Linux IO Schedulers today which is quite interesting. It goes in details about schedulers and explains in which of workloads which of schedulers is best.
The interesting thing this article points out is – there are multiple versions of each of the schedulers, while name remains the same. This means unless you really know mapping between kernel versions and scheduler versions it is very hard to evaluate benchmark results.
This could be noticed by benchmarks we’ve done over years. Long time ago “AS” scheduler could be several times slower than deadline for MySQL workloads such as SysBench or DBT2 when it went down to 30% difference and in the last runs we’ve done difference was not really significant.
This article also points out benchmarking IO schedulers you should look at more numbers than aggregate bandwidth – you also better to measure per client bandwidth as well as max latency as this is what can be the problem. Take a look at these old results for example. It also means you’d better to perform IO scheduler benchmarks on mixed load with different of task, for example mixing OLTP with some reporting queries if you really want to see the difference.
From the article it looks like CFQ should be good choice for databases and it is also found to work pretty well by some benchmarks we’ve done. The only question if it is doing as good as it could – In the docs it is mentioned it uses “per process” scheduling while MySQL is single process but single thread – does each thread gets its own queue in reality or is it shared ?
We should look into this when we’ll run more benchmarks for IO Schedulers.
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