Re: [Xen-users] Performance issues when serving a file from one domain to another (same host) on xen 3.4

[Todd Deshane <todd.deshane@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 9:31 PM, Joe Whitney <jwhitney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
> I have consistently seen poor performance when a domain is serving a file
> from a locally-attached storage device over the xenbridge "network" to
> another, client domain on the same host.  I have reduced the problem to the
> following very simple scenario involving two domUs: one client and one
> server.  For my purpose the only difference is that server has an SSD
> mounted (as a block device) at /mnt.  Each has 1 vcpu and 512mb RAM on a
> 4-hyperthreaded-core machine (shows as 8 "cores" in dom0).
> server: eth1 IP address 192.168.62.110
> client: eth1 IP address 192.168.62.202
> (in the following, I am executing "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" on
> dom0 before each command shown)
>
> First to test the speed of tearing through a random gigabyte of data I put
> there for the purpose:
> server# time cat /mnt/randgig > /dev/null
> ~4s (4 seconds, times here are averages over several runs, dropping caches
> between)
> Now let's test the speed of the "network" between client and server without
> interference from the disk
> server# dd if=/dev/zero bs=4096 count=262144 | nc -lvv -p 3500 -q0
> client# time nc 192.168.62.110 3500 > /dev/null
> ~3.5s
> Finally, let's actually transfer data from disk to the client
> server# dd if=/dev/zero bs=4096 count=262144 | nc -lvv -p 3500 -q0
> client# time nc 192.168.62.110 3500 > /dev/null
> ~18.8s
> So you see, it is much slower to both read from disk and transfer over the
> (xenbridge) network than to do either alone, even though (in theory) I have
> enough processors (4 or 8 depending on how you count) to do all the work.
> If I move the client to a different (identically configured) host attached
> by 1Gbit ethernet through a switch, I get these revised times:
> transfer a gig of /dev/zero from server to client: 9.5s instead of 3.5
> transfer a gig of /mnt/randgig from server to client: 14.2s instead of 18.8s
> !!
> This further confirms that there is some bad interaction between disk and
> network i/o scheduling, presumably in the dom0 backend but I am not sure how
> to tell for sure.
> I have tried every combination of # of vcpus, pinning vcpus, etc on both
> domUs and dom0.  I have also tried the experiment with dom0 as the server;
> the main difference is that the performance is worse in all cases but still
> better if the client is on a different host.
> So in summary my questions are:
> 1) why is it so much slower to transfer a file from disk over the xenbridge
> network than either reading from the disk or sending bytes over the network
> alone?
> 2) what can I do about it?
> I have searched in vain for any hint of this problem, except that the Xen
> documentation says somewhere I should pin and fix the number of dom0 cpus
> when doing I/O-intensive work in the guests, but I have tried this to no
> avail.
> I would appreciate any insights.

Have you tried making a bridge manually to see if it performs similarly?

What is the CPU load like during each of these (both dom0 and domU) cases?

Thanks,
Todd

-- 
Todd Deshane
http://www.linkedin.com/in/deshantm
http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html
http://runningxen.com/

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