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Re: [Xen-devel] apic-v reduce network performance in my test case



Hi Jan,
Thanks for the reply.

On 2015/2/2 18:12, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>> On 31.01.15 at 11:29, <john.liuqiming@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>       Recently I met an odd performance problem: when I turn on APIC
> Virtualization feature (apicv=1), the network performance of a windows
> guest become worse.
>
>       My test case like this: host only have one windows 2008 R2 HVM
> guest running,and this guest has a SR-IOV VF network passthrough to it.
> Guest using this network access a NAS device. No fontend or backend of
> network and storage, all data transfered through network.
>
>       The xentrace data shows: the mainly difference between apicv and
> non-apicv, is the way guest write apic registers, and
> EXIT_REASON_MSR_WRITE vmexit cost much more time than
> EXIT_REASON_APIC_WRITE, but when using WRMSR, the PAUSE vmexit is much
> less than using APIC-v.

There being heavier use of the pause VMEXIT doesn't by itself say
anything, I'm afraid. It may suggest that you have a C-state exit
latency problem - try lowering the maximum C-state allowed, or
disabling use of C-states altogether.
Sorry, I forgot to mention  my test scenario:
Its a video test suite,I am not sure what the logic inside the tools exactly 
(not opensource tool).
The basic flow is:
     1) test suite start several thread to read video file from disk (from NAS 
through network in my case)
     2) decode these video data as a frame one by one
     3) if  any frame delay more than 40ms, then mark as lost

test result:
       apicv=1,  there can be 15 thread running at the same time without lost 
frame
       apicv=0,  there can be 22 thread running at the same time without lost 
frame

so when I'm saying apicv reduce the performance, I got the conclusion from the 
test result not from what xentrace shows.

> In commit 7f2e992b824ec62a2818e64390ac2ccfbd74e6b7
> "VMX/Viridian: suppress MSR-based APIC suggestion when having APIC-V",
> msr based apic is disabled when apic-v is on, I wonder can they co-exist
> in some way? seems for windows guest msr-based apic has better performance.

The whole purpose is to avoid the costly MSR access exits. Why
would you want to reintroduce that overhead?

Jan

I agree to avoid the MSR access vmexit by using apicv, I just do not know 
what's the side effect.
Because from the test result,  apicv replacing  msr-based access brings 
performance reduction.

.





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