Preliminary Performance Results from Pavel's SMB3 Multicredit (large i/o) patches

[Steve French]

Pavel has been working on a patch series to improve performance of
large i/o from cifs.ko when mounted with the more modern SMB3
protocol.

My initial informal performance comparisons with and without his
patches looks very promising.

For comparison purposes among protocols etc. the default rsize that
will be negotiated is:
- for cifs mounts to Samba server (Unix Extensions enabled by default):  1MB
- for cifs mounts to servers that don't support the CIFS protocol Unix
Extensions: 61440
- for smb2/smb2.1/smb3 mounts prior to Pavel's patch series: 64K
- for smb2.1/smb3 mounts with his patch set: 1MB (write size also
increased from 64K to 1MB).

Note that protocol versions prior to SMB2.1 supported a maximum write
size of 64K (127K does work in some cases for cifs although rarely
used), except for the special case of cifs with Unix extensions.

Initial performance results are promising.   Using a 1GB source file
on the server and copying it ala dd if=/mnt/sample of=/mnt/target
bs=20M

(Source and target are virtual machines on the same laptop -
performance gains would likely be more impressive on real hardware.
Target system was Samba server version 4.1.9 on Fedora 20. Client
system was current mainline 3.16.0-rc3 on Ubuntu)
With SMB3 mounts without Pavel's patches (current mainline kernel 3.16.0-rc3)
46MB/s
With his patches:
91MB/s  (about a 2x improvement in large file copy performance)

(With cifs protocol instead of smb3 the performance was in between,
averaging about 65MB/s)

With my first set of iozone runs, I 2x to 4x improvement in read
performance with Pavel's patch set, and significant, although less
dramatic improvements in write performance.  See below:

File size set to 512000 KB
Record Size 1024 KB
Include close in write timing
Command line used: iozone -s 500m -r 1m -c
Output is in Kbytes/sec
Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
Processor cache size set to 1024 Kbytes.
Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
File stride size set to 17 * record size.

New module, smb3 mounts:
                                                            random
random    bkwd   record   stride
              KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read
write    read  rewrite     read   fwrite frewrite   fread  freread
          512000    1024  102225  118000   272040   276514  228472
184573  226345   112443   230808   187307   185719  279627   278387
          512000    1024  140464  111514   268999   277897  225019
139465  238265   125377   230924   112630   111014  275391   278125

Old module, prior to Pavel's paches, smb3 mounts:
          512000    1024   99480  100647    76163    76199   78331
108361   74927   108555    77629   100585   100621   76882    77539
          512000    1024   97903  142542    72895    75871   79708
108268   76519   105839    78979   122057   107614   75624    73454


-- 
Thanks,

Steve