readahead_example.txt

Demonstration of readahead, the Linux eBPF/bcc version

Read-ahead mechanism is used by operation sytems to optimize sequential operations
by reading ahead some pages to avoid more expensive filesystem operations. This tool
shows the performance of the read-ahead caching on the system under a given load to
investigate any caching issues. It shows a count for unused pages in the cache and
also prints a histogram showing how long they have remained there.

Usage Scenario
==============

Consider that you are developing a React Native application which performs aggressive
reads while re-encoding a video in local-storage. Usually such an app would be multi-
layered and have transitional library dependencies. The actual read may be performed
by some unknown native library which may or may not be using hints to the OS, such as
madvise(p, LEN, MADV_SEQUENTIAL). If high IOPS is observed in such an app, running
readahead may pin the issue much faster in this case as the developer digs deeper
into what may be causing this.

An example where such an issue can surface is: https://github.com/boltdb/bolt/issues/691

# readahead -d 30
Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to end.
^C
Read-ahead unused pages: 6765
Histogram of read-ahead used page age (ms):

     age (ms)            : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 4236     |****************************************|
         2 -> 3          : 394      |***                                     |
         4 -> 7          : 1670     |***************                         |
         8 -> 15         : 2132     |********************                    |
        16 -> 31         : 401      |***                                     |
        32 -> 63         : 1256     |***********                             |
        64 -> 127        : 2352     |**********************                  |
       128 -> 255        : 357      |***                                     |
       256 -> 511        : 369      |***                                     |
       512 -> 1023       : 366      |***                                     |
      1024 -> 2047       : 181      |*                                       |
      2048 -> 4095       : 439      |****                                    |
      4096 -> 8191       : 188      |*                                       |

In the example above, we recorded system-wide stats for 30 seconds. We can observe that
while most of the pages stayed in the readahead cache for quite less time, after 30
seconds 6765 pages still remained in the cache, yet unaccessed.

Note on Kprobes Usage
=====================

This tool uses Kprobes on the following kernel functions:

__do_page_cache_readahead()/do_page_cache_ra() (After kernel version 5.10 (include), __do_page_cache_readahead was renamed to do_page_cache_ra)
__page_cache_alloc()
mark_page_accessed()

Since the tool uses Kprobes, depending on your linux kernel's compilation, these
functions may be inlined and hence not available for Kprobes. To see whether you have
the functions available, check vmlinux source and binary to confirm whether inlining is
happening or not. You can also check /proc/kallsyms on the host and verify if the target
functions are present there before using this tool.