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2) Benchmarks
*************
- TODO: benchmarks with the following images:
- - Debian live iso (2G)
- - Arch Linux live iso (~550M)
- - Raspberry Pi 3 QT demo image (~390M)
+ 2.1) How was the Benchmark Performed?
- sqfs2tar $IMAGE | tar2sqfs -j $NUM_CPU -f out.sqfs
+ An optimized build of squashfs-tools-ng was compiled and installed to a tmpfs:
- Values to measure:
- - Total wall clock time of tar2sqfs.
- - Througput (bytes read / time, bytes written / time).
+ $ mkdir /dev/shm/temp
+ $ ln -s /dev/shm/temp out
+ $ ./autogen.sh
+ $ ./configure CFLAGS="-O3 -Ofast -march=native -mtune=native" \
+ LDFLAGS="-O3 -Ofast" --prefix=$(pwd)/out
+ $ make -j install
+ $ cd out
- Try the above for different compressors and stuff everything into
- a huge spread sheet. Then, determine the following and plot some
- nice graphs:
+ A SquashFS image to be tested was unpacked in this directory:
- - Absolute speedup (normalized to serial implementation).
- - Absolute efficiency (= speedup / $NUM_CPU)
- - Relative speedup (normalized to thread pool with -j 1).
- - Relative efficiency
+ $ ./bin/sqfs2tar <IMAGE> > test.tar
+ And then repacked as follows:
- Available test hardware:
- - 8(16) core AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GiB DDR4 RAM.
- - Various 4 core Intel Xeon servers. Precise Specs not known yet.
- - TODO: Check if my credentials on LCC2 still work. The cluster nodes AFAIK
- have dual socket Xeons. Not sure if 8 cores per CPU or 8 in total?
+ $ time ./bin/tar2sqfs -j <NUM_CPU> -c <COMPRESSOR> -f test.sqfs < test.tar
- For some compressors and work load, tar2sqfs may be I/O bound rather than CPU
- bound. The different machines have different storage which may impact the
- result. Should this be taken into account for comparison or eliminated by
- using a ramdisk or fiddling with the queue backlog?
+
+ Out of 4 runs, the worst wall-clock time ("real") was used for comparison.
+
+
+ For the serial reference version, configure was re-run with the option
+ --without-pthread, the tools re-compiled and re-installed.
+
+
+ 2.2) What Image was Tested?
+
+ A Debian image extracted from the Debian 10.2 LiveDVD for AMD64 with XFCE
+ was used.
+
+ The input size and resulting output sizes turned out to be as follows:
+
+ - As uncompressed tarball: ~6.5GiB (7,008,118,272)
+ - As LZ4 compressed SquashFS image: ~3.1GiB (3,381,751,808)
+ - As LZO compressed SquashFS image: ~2.5GiB (2,732,015,616)
+ - As zstd compressed SquashFS image: ~2.4GiB (2,536,910,848)
+ - As gzip compressed SquashFS image: ~2.3GiB (2,471,276,544)
+ - As lzma compressed SquashFS image: ~2.0GiB (2,102,169,600)
+ - As XZ compressed SquashFS image: ~2.0GiB (2,098,466,816)
+
+
+ The Debian image is expected to contain realistic input data for a Linux
+ file system and also provide enough data for an interesting benchmark.
+
+
+ 2.3) What Test System was used?
+
+ AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
+ 32GiB DDR4 RAM
+ Fedora 31 with Linux 5.4.17
+
+
+ 2.4) Results
+
+ The raw timing results are as follows:
+
+ Jobs XZ lzma gzip LZO LZ4 zstd
+ serial 17m59.413s 16m08.868s 10m02.632s 13m17.956s 18.218s 35.280s
+ 1 18m01.695s 16m02.329s 9m57.334s 13m14.374s 16.727s 34.108s
+ 2 9m34.939s 8m32.806s 5m12.791s 6m56.017s 13.161s 21.696s
+ 3 6m37.701s 5m55.246s 3m35.409s 4m50.138s 12.798s 18.265s
+ 4 5m07.896s 4m34.419s 2m47.108s 3m43.153s 13.191s 16.885s
+ 5 4m11.593s 3m44.764s 2m17.371s 3m02.429s 14.251s 17.389s
+ 6 3m34.115s 3m12.032s 1m57.972s 2m35.601s 14.824s 17.023s
+ 7 3m07.806s 2m47.815s 1m44.661s 2m16.289s 15.643s 17.676s
+ 8 2m47.589s 2m30.433s 1m33.865s 2m01.389s 16.262s 17.524s
+ 9 2m38.737s 2m22.159s 1m27.477s 1m53.976s 16.887s 18.110s
+ 10 2m30.942s 2m14.427s 1m22.424s 1m47.411s 17.316s 18.497s
+ 11 2m23.512s 2m08.470s 1m17.419s 1m41.965s 17.759s 18.831s
+ 12 2m17.083s 2m02.814s 1m13.644s 1m36.742s 18.335s 19.082s
+ 13 2m11.450s 1m57.820s 1m10.310s 1m32.492s 18.827s 19.232s
+ 14 2m06.525s 1m53.951s 1m07.483s 1m28.779s 19.471s 20.070s
+ 15 2m02.338s 1m50.358s 1m04.954s 1m25.993s 19.772s 20.608s
+ 16 1m58.566s 1m47.371s 1m03.616s 1m23.241s 20.188s 21.779s
+
+ The file "benchmark.ods" contains those values, values derived from this and
+ charts depicting the results.
+
+
+ 2.5) Discussion
+
+ Most obviously, the results indicate that LZ4 and zstd compression are clearly
+ I/O bound and not CPU bound. They don't benefit from parallelization beyond
+ 2-4 worker threads and even that benefit is marginal with efficiency
+ plummetting immediately.
+
+
+ The other compressors (XZ, lzma, gzip, lzo) are clearly CPU bound. Speedup
+ increases linearly until about 8 cores, but with a factor k < 1, paralleled by
+ efficiency decreasing down to 80% for 8 cores.
+
+ A reason for this sub-linear scaling may be the choke point introduced by the
+ creation of fragment blocks, that *requires* a synchronization. To test this
+ theory, a second benchmark should be performed with fragment block generation
+ completely disabled. This requires a new flag to be added to tar2sqfs (and
+ also gensquashfs).
+
+
+ Using more than 8 jobs causes a much slower increase in speedup and efficency
+ declines even faster. This is probably due to the fact that the test system
+ only has 8 physical cores and beyond that, SMT has to be used.
+
+
+ It should also be noted that the thread pool compressor with only a single
+ thread turns out to be *slightly* faster than the serial reference
+ implementation. A possible explanation for this might be that the fragment
+ blocks are actually assembled in the main thread, in parallel to the worker
+ that can still continue with other data blocks. Because of this decoupling
+ there is in fact some degree of parallelism, even if only one worker thread
+ is used.
+
+
+ As a side effect, this benchmark also produces some insights into the
+ compression ratio and throughput of the supported compressors. Indicating that
+ for the Debian live image, XZ clearly provides the highest data density, while
+ LZ4 is clearly the fastest compressor available, directly followed by zstd
+ which has a much better compression ratio than LZ4, comparable to the gzip
+ compressor, while being almost 50 times faster. The throughput of the zstd
+ compressor is truly impressive, considering the compression ratio it achieves.
+
+ Repeating the benchmark without tail-end-packing and wit fragments completely
+ disabled would also show the effectiveness of tail-end-packing and fragment
+ packing as a side effect.