Method and apparatus for adaptively blocking outgoing communication requests and adjusting the blocking factor according to the volume of requests being received in an information handling system

摘要

A method and apparatus for handling outgoing communication requests in an information handling system in which outgoing communication packets are accumulated into a block that is written to an input/output (I/O) device. For each I/O device there is generated a blocking factor representing a predetermined number of packets that are accumulated before the block is written to the I/O device, as well as a push interval representing a maximum period of time for which any packet in the block can be stalled. Upon the arrival of a new outgoing packet, the packet is added to the block, and the block is written to the I/O device if either the block now contains the predetermined packets or any packet in the packet has been waiting for more than the push interval. A timer running asynchronously with the arrival of outgoing requests periodically pops to write the block to the I/O device if it has been waiting overlong, even if no new requests have arrived. Both the blocking factor and the push interval are periodically adjusted in accordance with the actual throughput so that the blocking factor corresponds to the exact level of consistent parallelism for a given workload.