## I/O Tester utility

The I/O Tester utility, `io_tester` generates a user-defined I/O pattern
spanning one of multiple shards that is designed to simulate the I/O behavior
of a complex Seastar application.

# Running I/O tester:

I/O tester takes the same options as Seastar, and those options may be used
to test the behavior of I/O under the circumnstances established by those
options. For instance, one may adjust the `--task-quota-ms` option to see
if that affects higher percentile latencies.

Aside from the usual seastar options, I/O tester accepts the following options:

* `duration`: for how long to run the evaluation,
* `storage`: a directory or a block device where to execute the test (it must be on XFS),
* `conf`: the path to a YAML file describing the evaluation,
* `keep-files`: a flag that indicates keeping test files - next run may re-use them.

# Describing the evaluation

The evaluation is described in a YAML file that contains multiple classes.
Each class spans jobs of similar characteristics in different shards and (for now)
all jobs run concurrently.

The YAML file contains a list of maps where each element of the list describes a class.
A class has some properties that are common to all elements of the class, and a nested map
that contain properties of a job (class instance in a shard)

For example:

```
- name: big_writes
  type: seqread
  shards: all
  shard_info:
    parallelism: 10
    reqsize: 256kB
    shares: 10
    think_time: 0
```

* `name`: mandatory property, a string that identifies jobs of this class
* `type`: mandatory property, one of seqread, seqwrite, randread, randwrite, append, cpu, unlink
* `shards`: mandatory property, either the string "all" or a list of shards where this class should place jobs.
* `data_size`: optional property, used to divide the available disk space between workloads. Each shard inside the workload uses its portion of the assigned space. If not specified 1GB is used.
* `extent_allocation_size_hint`: optional property, allows setting the hint for allocation of extents for files. If not specified, then the size of file is used as hint.
* `files_count`: optional property, relevant only for unlink job class - in such case it is required. Describes the number of files that need to be created during startup to be unlinked during evaluation. Describes files count per shard.

> **_NOTE:_** the actual file size is always aligned to 1MB.
> **_NOTE:_** if not properly aligned, then the extent allocation size hint is aligned to 128kB by seastar.

The properties under `shard_info` represent properties of the job that will
be replicated to each shard. All properties under `shard_info` are optional, and in case not specified, defaults are used.

* `parallelism`: the amount of parallel requests this job will generate in a specific shard. Requests can be either active or thinking (see `think_time`)
* `limit`: the maximum number of requests to send in this job. If not set, job sends requests throughout the whole `duration`
* `rps`: the requests-per-second rate to apply to sending fibers. If unset, each fiber sends new request as soon as previous one completes
* `reqsize` : (I/O loads only) the size of requests generated by this job
* `shares` : how many shares requests in this job will have in the scheduler
* `class`: name of the job to share the sched class with (used if `shares` is not set)
* `think_time`: how long to wait before submitting another request in this job once one finishes.
* `execution_time`: (cpu loads only) for how long to execute a CPU loop

# Example output

```
      Creating initial files...
      Starting evaluation...
      Shard  0
       Class 0(big_writes: 10 shares, 262144-byte SEQ WRITE, 10 concurrent requests, NO think time)
        Throughput         :   436556 KB/s
        Lat average        :     5847 usec
        Lat quantile=  0.5 :     2678 usec
        Lat quantile= 0.95 :    13029 usec
        Lat quantile= 0.99 :    20835 usec
        Lat quantile=0.999 :   246090 usec
        Lat max            :   450785 usec
```

# Future

Some ideas for extending I/O tester:

* allow properties like think time, request size, etc, to be specified as distributions instead of a fixed number
* allow classes to have class-wide properties. For instance, we could define a class with parallelism of 100, and distribute those 100 requests over all shards in which this class is placed
* allow some jobs to be executed sequentially in relationship to others, so we can have preparation jobs.
* support other types, like sync, etc.
* provide functionality similar to diskplorer.