Techniques for increasing storage system performance in processor-bound workloads with large working sets and poor spatial locality

Abstract

An improved technique involves processing a workflow in stages, and processing all requests in a queue for a given stage before moving onto the next stage. Along these lines, each request received by a storage processor is assigned to a core and placed in a first queue for that core. Within that core, a single system thread executes first instructions for a task, e.g., checking the storage cache for the requested data from a request, and then transfers the request to a second queue. Rather than perform additional tasks to completely satisfy the request, however, the thread executes the first instructions for a prespecified number of requests in the first queue. Only when the thread has executed instructions for the prespecified number of requests, the thread begins execution of second instructions for requests in the second queue, and work on the next task begins.