Stream protocols such as TCP can often build up a backlog of data to be
read due to ordering. Combine this with the fact that some workloads such
as NFS read()-intensive workloads need to receive a lot of data per RPC
call, and it turns out that receiving the data from inside a softirq
context can cause starvation.
The following patch moves the TCP data receive into a workqueue context.
We still end up calling tcp_read_sock(), but we do so from a process
context, meaning that softirqs are enabled for most of the time.
With this patch, I see a doubling of read bandwidth when running a
multi-threaded iozone workload between a virtual client and server setup.
Signed-off-by: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@primarydata.com>
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