block: avoid building too big plug list

When I test fio script with big I/O depth, I found the total throughput drops
compared to some relative small I/O depth. The reason is the thread accumulates
big requests in its plug list and causes some delays (surely this depends
on CPU speed).
I thought we'd better have a threshold for requests. When a threshold reaches,
this means there is no request merge and queue lock contention isn't severe
when pushing per-task requests to queue, so the main advantages of blk plug
don't exist. We can force a plug list flush in this case.
With this, my test throughput actually increases and almost equals to small
I/O depth. Another side effect is irq off time decreases in blk_flush_plug_list()
for big I/O depth.
The BLK_MAX_REQUEST_COUNT is choosen arbitarily, but 16 is efficiently to
reduce lock contention to me. But I'm open here, 32 is ok in my test too.

Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/blkdev.h b/include/linux/blkdev.h
index 36f2e2b99ae3..92edb9601242 100644
--- a/include/linux/blkdev.h
+++ b/include/linux/blkdev.h
@@ -862,7 +862,10 @@ struct blk_plug {
 	struct list_head list;
 	struct list_head cb_list;
 	unsigned int should_sort;
+	unsigned int count;
 };
+#define BLK_MAX_REQUEST_COUNT 16
+
 struct blk_plug_cb {
 	struct list_head list;
 	void (*callback)(struct blk_plug_cb *);