On 8/14/18 11:18 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 13.08.2018 um 18:42 hat Leonid Bloch geschrieben:
I don't actually think it's so bad to keep the cache permanently
allocated, but I wouldn't object to a lower default for non-Linux hosts
either. 1 MB may still be a little too low, 4 MB (covers up to 32 GB)
might be more adequate. My typical desktop VMs are larger than 8 GB, but
smaller than 32 GB.
And for a Windows VM just the OS installation takes above 40 GB. While we
probably are not running Windows VMs for our own needs, it is very common
that a customer of, for example, some cloud service uses QEMU (unknowingly)
for a full-blown Windows. So 100 GB+ images which are quite heavily used is
not a rare scenario. 256 GB - yeah, that would be on the higher end.
The OS installation is mostly sequential access, though. You only need
that much cache when you have completely random I/O across the whole
image. Otherwise the LRU based approach of the cache is good enough to
keep those tables cached that are actually in use.
Sorry, by "OS installation" I meant the installed size of the OS, which
should be available for fast and frequent access, not the installation
process itself. Obviously for one-time tasks like the installation
process it's not worth it, unless one installs all the time, instead of
using ready images, for some reason. :)
The maximum cache size is maybe for huge databases or indeed random I/O
benchmarks, both of which are important to support (on Linux at least),
but probably not the most common use case.
So 16 MB would indeed be a reasonable default for the *max.* L2 cache now,
although below that would be too little, I think. 32 MB - if we want some
future-proofing.
I think we all agree that 32 MB + cache-clean-interval is okay.
It's just that for non-Linux guests, cache-clean-interval doesn't work.
However, we probably care less about those large random I/O cases there,
so a smaller cache size like 1 MB can do on non-Linux.
Kevin
