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Leigh B. Stoller authored
requires the linux threads package to give us kernel level pthreads. From: Leigh Stoller <stoller@fast.cs.utah.edu> To: Testbed Operations <testbed-ops@fast.cs.utah.edu> Cc: Jay Lepreau <lepreau@cs.utah.edu> Subject: Frisbee Redux Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 12:03:56 -0800 Server: The server is multithreaded. One thread takes in requests from the clients, and adds the request to a work queue. The other thread processes the work queue in fifo order, spitting out the desrired block ranges. A request is a chunk/block/blockcount tuple, and most of the time the clients are requesting complete 1MB chunks. The exception of course is when individual blocks are lost, in which case the clients request just those subranges. The server it totally asynchronous; It maintains a list of who is "connected", but thats just to make sure we can time the server out after a suitable inactive time. The server really only cares about the work queue; As long as the queue si non empty, it spits out data. Client: The client is also multithreaded. One thread receives data packets and stuffs them in a chunkbuffer data structure. This thread also request more data, either to complete chunks with missing blocks, or to request new chunks. Each client can read ahead up 2 chunks, although with multiple clients it might actually be much further ahead as it also receives chunks that other clients requested. I set the number of chunk buffers to 16, although this is probably unnecessary as I will explain below. The other thread waits for chunkbuffers to be marked complete, and then invokes the imagunzip code on that chunk. Meanwhile, the other thread is busily getting more data and requesting/reading ahread, so that by the time the unzip is done, there is another chunk to unzip. In practice, the main thread never goes idle after the first chunk is received; there is always a ready chunk for it. Perfect overlap of I/O! In order to prevent the clients from getting overly synchronized (and causing all the clients to wait until the last client is done!), each client randomizes it block request order. This why we can retain the original frisbee name; clients end up catching random blocks flung out from the server until it has all the blocks. Performance: The single node speed is about 180 seconds for our current full image. Frisbee V1 compares at about 210 seconds. The two node speed was 181 and 174 seconds. The amount of CPU used for the two node run ranged from 1% to 4%, typically averaging about 2% while I watched it with "top." The main problem on the server side is how to keep boss (1GHZ with a Gbit ethernet) from spitting out packets so fast that 1/2 of them get dropped. I eventually settled on a static 1ms delay every 64K of packets sent. Nothing to be proud of, but it works. As mentioned above, the number of chunk buffers is 16, although only a few of them are used in practice. The reason is that the network transfer speed is perhaps 10 times faster than the decompression and raw device write speed. To know for sure, I would have to figure out the per byte transfer rate for 350 MBs via network, via the time to decompress and write the 1.2GB of data to the raw disk. With such a big difference, its only necessary to ensure that you stay 1 or 2 chunks ahead, since you can request 10 chunks in the time it takes to write one of them.
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