Question(s) about smbd in respect to preadv2

Michael Adam obnox at samba.org
Sat Jan 24 14:12:49 MST 2015


Hi Milosz,

On 2015-01-24 at 15:46 -0500, Milosz Tanski wrote:
> I'm at a bit of a cross roads with testing preadv2 using samba and how
> samba could benefit from the syscall. I need to better understand the
> samba architecture today and where it's going. I spent a few hours
> yesterday and today better to understand samba; I also looked at
> Jermey's SambaXP 2014 talk. There's a few clarifications I need.
> 
> I did some preliminary testing using preadv2 to perform. The first
> tests I ran were using the source3 smbd server. And I compared the
> sync, pthreadpool and pthreadpool + preadv2. Just a simple rand read
> test with one client with a cached data.
> 
> The results were that sync was fastest (no surprise there).
> Pthreadpool + preadv2 was about 8% slower then sync. Plain old
> pthreadpool 26% slower. So not a bad win there. Additionally, it looks
> like the vfs_pread_send and vfs_pread_recv have a bit more overhead
> over plain old vfs_pread in the code path so it's possible to get that
> 8% even closer to the sync case.

That is definitely very intresting.

> So far, so good... but what struct me is that I don't really
> understand why samba uses the pthreadpool if forks() for each client
> connection? Why bother.

Right, currently each tcp connection corresponds to an
smbd child proces, but there may be several clients behind
one tcp connection (in the case of a windows terminal
server) or a multi-threaded client. Therefore it is
important not to block on single syscalls. Hence the
pthreadpool which encapsulates syscalls in threads.

> From looking at the code in for source3, source4 and internet readings
> (like Jeremy's talk). It looks like there's an ambition to not have a
> process per connection model in the future. Am I correct in that
> assumption?

Vaguely, yes. One example is the work in process
to implement SMB3 multi-channel. This is solved
in our current apporoach by fd-passing tcp-connections
to one smbd process that already serves the same
SMB3 CLient GUID. Hence we have a per-client-GUID
single-process model, which makes the fanning-out
by use of threads even more important.

See e.g.
http://blog.obnox.de/demo-of-smb3-multi-channel-with-samba/
for a demo and some explanation what's going on.
This work will hopefully be completed and integrated
into upstream very soon!

> Is the hope to have one process with a main (or few) thread handling
> the most of the incoming network IO and then a largish threadpool for
> performing most of the accentual disk IO work?
> 
> That's the kind of use case that preadv2 was conceived for. Otherwise
> I'm not sure if it's the right fit and I'm not quite sure what's the
> point of the threadpool is.

That definitely sounds very interesting for this future
mode of operation! We may also work towards a general
single-process model. The per client-GUID approach is
going half-way there.

Cheers - Michael

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