On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 8:35 AM, James Harper
<james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The reason I am looking to monitor these rings is to find the variability of
> the data transfer through the TX/RX rings i.e. inbound/outbound network
> traffic. I am doing variability analysis for various combination of VMs
> running in Xen. I am looking at both CPU and Network level metrics. The goal
> is to infer characteristics looking at these lower level metrics about the VMs
> running.
>
> On my current installation of Xen 3.4.3 with 2.6.18.8 kernel , Âthe data
> mentioned in /sys/devices/vbd- or /sys/devices/vif is not available. I need to
> upgrade my kernel.
>
> I have seen that if I monitor the network traffic input and output throughput
> data (through say xentop running application - RUBiS) it does not really vary
> a lot. So I want to monitor the lower levels to see if there exists
> variability that eventually evens out.
>
Monitoring just the rings will not tell you about tx-full or rx-starvation conditions. You would also need to measure when DomU wants to transmit a packet but there is no space left on the tx ring, or when Dom0 has a packet for DomU but Dom0 has used all of the rx buffers given by DomU. I would find those measurements useful.
James
