About managing application I/O workloads using maximum IOPS settings

When multiple applications use a common storage subsystem, it is important to ensure that a particular application does not monopolize the storage bandwidth thereby impacting all the other applications using the same storage. It is also important to balance the application I/O requests in a way that allows all the applications to co-exist in a shared environment. You can address this need by setting a maximum threshold on the I/O operations per second (MAXIOPS) for the file system.

The MAXIOPS limit determines the maximum number of I/Os processed per second collectively by the storage underlying the file system.

When an I/O request comes in from an application, it is serviced by the storage underlying the file system until the application I/O reaches the MAXIOPS limit. When the limit is exceeded for a specified time interval, further I/O requests on the application are queued. The queued I/Os are taken up on priority in the next time interval along with new I/O requests from the application.

Only application-based I/Os can be managed with MAXIOPS.

MAXIOPS addresses the use case environment of multiple applications using a common storage subsystem where an application is throttled because of insufficient storage bandwidth while another less critical application uses more storage bandwidth.

See the maxiops man pages for detailed examples.