How to loop a timebased job

Hey,

I'm on the IRC channel trying to help someone that needs to do the following :

doing IOs for x seconds
sleeping for y seconds
and looping this z times

While trying to setup this, I faced that loops and timebased seems exclusive options.
Am I wrong on this point ?

If not, would it be possible not to let them exclusive or add a new option to handle this case?

It should work, if it doesn't, I agree it's a bug. It's not certain than anyone has considered this specific use case before. Feel free to fix! Or I can take a look at it tomorrow.

Quoted 3 lines · Jens Axboe

It should work, if it doesn't, I agree it's a bug. It's not certain than anyone has considered this specific use case before. Feel free to fix! Or I can take a look at it tomorrow.

I think I found the issue but my main question is about priority.

If both time & loops are set, what shall be considered as the key element to stop the benchmark.

Today, time have the priority over loops as keep_running() returns if time_based while time is handled in do_io().

If I do remove this test in keep_running, the first of the two getting the limit will stop the job.
On one hand, we have timebased option to insure time over end of device. Shall we put a loopbased on the other hand ?

Good point, yes, that is a problem. Adding a loopbased option would seem to be the best way to solve the dependency issue.

Quoted 2 lines · Jens Axboe

Good point, yes, that is a problem. Adding a loopbased option would seem to be the best way to solve the dependency issue.

Ok, I'm working on this option.

Here come the kind of usage I'm thinking about :

[general]
....
loop_based
loops=5

[job_1]
....
runtime=10

[job_2]
....
runtime=20

That lever the question on where we shall "loop" the jobs ? What's the preferred option regarding your experience on fio ? The main problem I'm facing is to reinit properly jobs between loops (like td->terminate or doing the start_delay,...)

Shall it be better to manage it inside thread_main() or get it outside ?