[invertedohm]

Kernel 4.18 is _ancient_, weird to test on that. Also I wonder if the whole performance increase can't just be achieved by lowering the readahead size a bit. I see in their notes they have a decent SSD but set the blockdev readahead to 64. Depending on your workload it's much more performant to lower that to 16. As mentioned in TFA, fast storage is the most important factor here, and in my experience combining that with a smaller readahead pretty much fixes any read amplification issues you get with the larger readahead.

[irondhoti]

Take a look at this https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3341301.3359640 ; shows how newer kernels are slower. I have seen supercomputers like `summit` use linux 2.xx .

There are two performance problems presented here. One is the fact that the OS waits till a static memory bank water-level before triggering a cleanup.

The second is the one you pointed out; here again one thing to consider is cassandra's compression chunk size `chunk_length_in_kb`. readahead value less than chunk size makes cassandra slow in general. take a look at this https://thelastpickle.com/blog/2018/08/08/compression_perfor... for more info on it.