Re: [Qemu-block] [PATCH v7 6/9] qcow2: Increase the default upper limit on the L2 cache size

[Kevin Wolf]

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.

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