Re: [Xen-devel] CAP and performance problem

[Massimo Canonico <mex@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/21/2013 12:48 PM, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 11:41 AM, George Dunlap
> <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Massimo Canonico <mex@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > I sent the following problem on xen-user ML without an answer. I hope I'll
> > > get one in this ML.
> > >
> > > My application is written in std C++ and it makes a matrix multiplication:
> > > so it uses only CPU and memory (no I/O, no network).
> > >
> > >
> > > I'm quite surprise that with CAP = 100% I got my results in about 600
> > > seconds and with CAP = 50% I got my results in about 1800 seconds (around 3
> > > times longer).
> > >
> > > For this kind of application I was expecting to get results in about 1200
> > > seconds (2 times longer) for the second scenario with respect to the first
> > > one.
> > >
> > > Of course, the HW and SW are exactly the same for the 2 experiments.
> > >
> > > Am I wrong or the CAP mechanism is not working well?
> > How many vcpus do you have?
> >
> > I'm not sure the CAP stuff actually does anything sensible with
> > multiple cpus -- e.g., a VM with 2 vcpus maxed out will typically
> > actually get 200%, so will a CAP force both of them to get only 25%
> > each?
> >
> > The other possibility if you've got multiple vcpus is that you're
> > running into something I call "concurrency hazard": if one vcpu grabs
> > a spinlock and then is paused in order to enforce the cap, and another
> > vcpu tries to grab that spinlock, it will just spin until the first
> > vcpu manages to wake up and release it again.
> Sorry, meant to add: if you have more than one vcpu and you want to
> limit the cpu footprint, you're much better off halving the number of
> vcpus rather than giving each vcpu only 50% of a cpu.
>
> I gave a presentation on why here, if you're interested:
>
> http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/2930
>
>   -George
Hi George,
thanks for your answer.

Our physical machine has two processors and two cores for each processors.

The virtual machine where our application run has just one VCPU that is 
pinned to a single core.
Instead, dom0 was not pinned to any particular core.

So I think that my problem could not be related to the presence of 4 vcpus.

Any idea?
M


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