At one point we noticed that our disks were not as fast as we would like them to be. Some profiling as well as a quick A/B test pointed to Linux disk encryption. Because not encrypting the data (even if it is supposed-to-be a public Internet cache) is not a sustainable option, we decided to take a closer look into Linux disk encryption performance.

To be fair the request does not always traverse all these queues, but the important part here is that write requests may be queued up to 4 times in dm-crypt and read requests up to 3 times. At this point we were wondering if all this extra queueing can cause any performance issues. For example, there is a nice presentation from Google about the relationship between queueing and tail latency. One key takeaway from the presentation is: A significant amount of tail latency is due to queueing effects

source: HN