Summary:
This change improves the performance of iterators doing long range scans (e.g. big/full table scans in MyRocks) by using readahead and prefetching additional data on each disk IO. This prefetching is automatically enabled on noticing more than 2 IOs for the same table file during iteration. The readahead size starts with 8KB and is exponentially increased on each additional sequential IO, up to a max of 256 KB. This helps in cutting down the number of IOs needed to complete the range scan.
Constraints:
- The prefetched data is stored by the OS in page cache. So this currently works only for non direct-reads use-cases i.e applications which use page cache. (Direct-I/O support will be enabled in a later PR).
- This gets currently enabled only when ReadOptions.readahead_size = 0 (which is the default value).
Thanks to siying for the original idea and implementation.
**Benchmarks:**
Data fill:
```
TEST_TMPDIR=/data/users/$USER/benchmarks/iter ./db_bench -benchmarks=fillrandom -num=1000000000 -compression_type="none" -level_compaction_dynamic_level_bytes
```
Do a long range scan: Seekrandom with large number of nexts
```
TEST_TMPDIR=/data/users/$USER/benchmarks/iter ./db_bench -benchmarks=seekrandom -duration=60 -num=1000000000 -use_existing_db -seek_nexts=10000 -statistics -histogram
```
Page cache was cleared before each experiment with the command:
```
sudo sh -c "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"
```
```
Before:
seekrandom : 34020.945 micros/op 29 ops/sec; 32.5 MB/s (1636 of 1999 found)
With this change:
seekrandom : 8726.912 micros/op 114 ops/sec; 126.8 MB/s (5702 of 6999 found)
```
~3.9X performance improvement.
Also verified with strace and gdb that the readahead size is increasing as expected.
```
strace -e readahead -f -T -t -p <db_bench process pid>
```
Closes https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/pull/3282
Differential Revision: D6586477
Pulled By: sagar0
fbshipit-source-id: 8a118a0ed4594fbb7f5b1cafb242d7a4033cb58c
Sagar Vemuri