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Re: [Xen-devel] CAP and performance problem



On 06/06/13 14:55, Massimo Canonico wrote:

On 06/06/2013 03:02 PM, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 06.06.2013 14:52, Massimo Canonico wrote:

On 06/06/2013 12:44 PM, George Dunlap wrote:
On 06/06/13 11:39, Juergen Gross wrote:
On 06.06.2013 10:57, Massimo Canonico wrote:

On 06/06/2013 10:37 AM, Dario Faggioli wrote:
On mer, 2013-06-05 at 19:05 +0200, Massimo Canonico wrote:
Hi Dario,
and thanks for these test.

I forgot to ask you which xen version has beed used for your experiments.

Yeah, me too! :-)

I'm using xen-unstable, pulled yesterday (commit id
e430510e5cbbfcdc1077739292def633e70fedea), compiled and installed on a
Debian unstable system. Dom0 kernel is a bit old, as it's a 3.6.

What about you?
xen 4.2.2
kernel dom0: 3.8.11-200.fc18.x86_64

Just had an idea: is there any other load on the system during your test (other domains, dom0 load)? If not, it could be that the power management is reducing the cpu speed during idle (when the cap applies). This could lead to reduced
performance overall.

You can test this by setting the xen hypervisor boot option

cpufreq=none

and run your test again (with and without cap).

Ah, genius Juergen! That would make total sense.

-George

Unfortunately, this did not change much. I set "cpufreq=none" in the boot line

You added the boot parameter for the hypervisor, not dom0?
Fedora, after few seconds, asks you which kernel do you want to use. You can add some parameter in the command line who launches the kernel. So, I add "cpufreq=none" in the command line.
And (please forgive
my paranoia) you rebooted the complete system after that?
Your paranoia is also mine, I always reboot my machines. Thanks for asking.
and restart my experiment.
With no cap I got 298.029
with cap=50% I got 910.272
(average values of 3 experiments for each cap setting)

dom0 load during the experiment is less than 1% (that says xentop)

What was the load reported by xentop for your domu?
My virtual machines is called rubis-web and during "cap=50%" experiment I can see this values in xentop for this specific domain.

Could you try:

xl vcpu-list; sleep 10; xl vcpu-list

when the test is running and post the output?


Juergen

here we go:

[root@csitest ~]# xl vcpu-list; sleep 10; xl vcpu-list
Name ID VCPU CPU State Time(s) CPU Affinity
Domain-0                             0     0    0   ---      23.0 0
Domain-0                             0     1    0   ---      10.5 0
Domain-0                             0     2    0   ---       8.5 0
Domain-0                             0     3    0   r--       6.8 0
rubis-web                            1     0    2   r--    2968.5 2
Name ID VCPU CPU State Time(s) CPU Affinity
Domain-0                             0     0    0   ---      23.0 0
Domain-0                             0     1    0   r--      10.6 0
Domain-0                             0     2    0   ---       8.5 0
Domain-0                             0     3    0   ---       6.8 0
rubis-web                            1     0    2   r--    2973.5 2

Concerning the George's question:
Have you checked your BIOS for performance settings?
I'm not sure what you mean for "BIOS perfomance settings". To my best knowledge, in the BIOS I have to be sure that the "hw virtualization" is enabled.

Some BIOSes have settings that will automatically mess around with the performance settings of the processor. This could be automatically slowing the core down because it's only 50% busy. This would be different on each BIOS. Just take a quick look for anything that seems to say something about performance, and set it to "max" or "performance" mode (as opposed to say, power-saving or balanced mode).

You might also try playing around with the "turbo" mode if it's available -- maybe the "turbo" mode takes a bit of time to get going, and running at 50% never kicks it in. If you disable "turbo" mode, you may find that with no cap you get 450s instead of 300s.

 -George

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