Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 0/2] block latency histogram

[Emilio G. Cota]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 14:42:29 +0300, Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy wrote:
> Hi Emilio!
> 
> Looked through qdist, if I understand correctly, it saves each added (with
> different value) element. It is not effective for disk io timing - we'll
> have too much elements. In my approach, histogram don't grow, it initially
> have several ranges and counts hits to each range.

I thought about this use case, i.e. having a gazillion elements.
You should just do some pre-binning before inserting samples
into qdist, as pointed out in this comment in qdist.h:

/*
 * Samples with the same 'x value' end up in the same qdist_entry,
 * e.g. inc(0.1) and inc(0.1) end up as {x=0.1, count=2}.
 *
 * Binning happens only at print time, so that we retain the flexibility to
 * choose the binning. This might not be ideal for workloads that do not care
 * much about precision and insert many samples all with different x values;
 * in that case, pre-binning (e.g. entering both 0.115 and 0.097 as 0.1)
 * should be considered.
 */
struct qdist_entry {
    double x;
    unsigned long count;
};

Let me know if you need help with that.

Thanks,

                Emilio