Disksort may deteriorate the i/o performance (Doc ID 1284969.1)

Last updated on OCTOBER 05, 2022

Applies to:

Symptoms

The disk I/O sub-systems are built to provide maximum throughput which is most often the right thing. However the weakness of tuning for throughput is that occasionally you can get some bizarre behavior when it comes to latency. The way that optimum I/O bandwidth is achieved is by sorting each io by logical block address (LBA) and then issuing those in order to minimize head seek. This is documented in the disksort(9F) manual page.

As a result, disksort could deteriorate the io performance for certain I/O workload leading to I/O performance issues and or cluster panic in some extreme cases.

To determine if your system has been impacted by the adverse effect of disksort,  check the iostat as below, and examine if commands are waiting too much in the wait queue as in the example below.

These are the some of the indication that commands are indeed spending a lot of time in the wait queue, waiting for the disksort to sort the commands based on the LBA.

Cause

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