The 'overloads-avoided' counter itself was removed several years ago by
commit 78c210e (Revert "knfsd: avoid overloading the CPU scheduler with
enormous load averages").
Signed-off-by: Scott Mayhew <smayhew@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@redhat.com>
		
	
			
		
			
				
	
	
		
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			124 lines
		
	
	
		
			5.0 KiB
		
	
	
	
		
			Plaintext
		
	
	
	
	
	
| 
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| Kernel NFS Server Statistics
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| ============================
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| 
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| This document describes the format and semantics of the statistics
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| which the kernel NFS server makes available to userspace.  These
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| statistics are available in several text form pseudo files, each of
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| which is described separately below.
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| 
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| In most cases you don't need to know these formats, as the nfsstat(8)
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| program from the nfs-utils distribution provides a helpful command-line
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| interface for extracting and printing them.
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| 
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| All the files described here are formatted as a sequence of text lines,
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| separated by newline '\n' characters.  Lines beginning with a hash
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| '#' character are comments intended for humans and should be ignored
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| by parsing routines.  All other lines contain a sequence of fields
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| separated by whitespace.
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| 
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| /proc/fs/nfsd/pool_stats
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| ------------------------
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| 
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| This file is available in kernels from 2.6.30 onwards, if the
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| /proc/fs/nfsd filesystem is mounted (it almost always should be).
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| 
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| The first line is a comment which describes the fields present in
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| all the other lines.  The other lines present the following data as
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| a sequence of unsigned decimal numeric fields.  One line is shown
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| for each NFS thread pool.
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| 
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| All counters are 64 bits wide and wrap naturally.  There is no way
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| to zero these counters, instead applications should do their own
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| rate conversion.
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| 
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| pool
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| 	The id number of the NFS thread pool to which this line applies.
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| 	This number does not change.
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| 
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| 	Thread pool ids are a contiguous set of small integers starting
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| 	at zero.  The maximum value depends on the thread pool mode, but
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| 	currently cannot be larger than the number of CPUs in the system.
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| 	Note that in the default case there will be a single thread pool
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| 	which contains all the nfsd threads and all the CPUs in the system,
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| 	and thus this file will have a single line with a pool id of "0".
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| 
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| packets-arrived
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| 	Counts how many NFS packets have arrived.  More precisely, this
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| 	is the number of times that the network stack has notified the
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| 	sunrpc server layer that new data may be available on a transport
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| 	(e.g. an NFS or UDP socket or an NFS/RDMA endpoint).
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| 
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| 	Depending on the NFS workload patterns and various network stack
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| 	effects (such as Large Receive Offload) which can combine packets
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| 	on the wire, this may be either more or less than the number
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| 	of NFS calls received (which statistic is available elsewhere).
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| 	However this is a more accurate and less workload-dependent measure
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| 	of how much CPU load is being placed on the sunrpc server layer
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| 	due to NFS network traffic.
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| 
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| sockets-enqueued
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| 	Counts how many times an NFS transport is enqueued to wait for
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| 	an nfsd thread to service it, i.e. no nfsd thread was considered
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| 	available.
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| 
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| 	The circumstance this statistic tracks indicates that there was NFS
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| 	network-facing work to be done but it couldn't be done immediately,
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| 	thus introducing a small delay in servicing NFS calls.  The ideal
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| 	rate of change for this counter is zero; significantly non-zero
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| 	values may indicate a performance limitation.
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| 
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| 	This can happen because there are too few nfsd threads in the thread
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| 	pool for the NFS workload (the workload is thread-limited), in which
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| 	case configuring more nfsd threads will probably improve the
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| 	performance of the NFS workload.
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| 
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| threads-woken
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| 	Counts how many times an idle nfsd thread is woken to try to
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| 	receive some data from an NFS transport.
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| 
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| 	This statistic tracks the circumstance where incoming
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| 	network-facing NFS work is being handled quickly, which is a good
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| 	thing.  The ideal rate of change for this counter will be close
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| 	to but less than the rate of change of the packets-arrived counter.
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| 
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| threads-timedout
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| 	Counts how many times an nfsd thread triggered an idle timeout,
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| 	i.e. was not woken to handle any incoming network packets for
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| 	some time.
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| 
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| 	This statistic counts a circumstance where there are more nfsd
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| 	threads configured than can be used by the NFS workload.  This is
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| 	a clue that the number of nfsd threads can be reduced without
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| 	affecting performance.  Unfortunately, it's only a clue and not
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| 	a strong indication, for a couple of reasons:
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| 
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| 	 - Currently the rate at which the counter is incremented is quite
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| 	   slow; the idle timeout is 60 minutes.  Unless the NFS workload
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| 	   remains constant for hours at a time, this counter is unlikely
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| 	   to be providing information that is still useful.
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| 
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| 	 - It is usually a wise policy to provide some slack,
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| 	   i.e. configure a few more nfsds than are currently needed,
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| 	   to allow for future spikes in load.
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| 
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| 
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| Note that incoming packets on NFS transports will be dealt with in
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| one of three ways.  An nfsd thread can be woken (threads-woken counts
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| this case), or the transport can be enqueued for later attention
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| (sockets-enqueued counts this case), or the packet can be temporarily
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| deferred because the transport is currently being used by an nfsd
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| thread.  This last case is not very interesting and is not explicitly
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| counted, but can be inferred from the other counters thus:
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| 
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| packets-deferred = packets-arrived - ( sockets-enqueued + threads-woken )
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| 
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| 
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| More
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| ----
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| Descriptions of the other statistics file should go here.
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| 
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| 
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| Greg Banks <gnb@sgi.com>
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| 26 Mar 2009
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