[Xen-users] Extremely poor dom0 performance on SUSE 10.0

[Paul Gear <pgear@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

I'm having some extremely irritating performance problems trying to get
a Xen system up and running.  I'm following the SUSE Linux Xen live
migration demo HOWTO from
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Image:XEN_migration_demo_1.1.pdf

I'm using SUSE 10.0 x64-64 with xen-3.0_8259-0.1 (obtained from YOU, but
also seems to be the latest available on forge.novell.com), and whenever
i boot the Xen kernel, the system slows to a fraction of its native
performance.

My hardware is:
- Dell PE SC1425, 2 x Xeon 2.8, 2 x 2 GB DDR2 RAM, 2 x 250 GB SATA
- Dell PE 850, Pentium D 830 (3.0 GHz), 4 x 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 2 x 250 GB SATA

My intent is to use these two machines as dom0 platforms for live
migration of 5 domUs, and host the domU file systems on iSCSI over
1000baseT, served from a dedicated NetWare 6.5 SP5 iSCSI target.

I haven't even made it to booting a domU yet, as the performance of the
system is so poor.  My first "yast2 dirinstall" is running now, and i
hope to get the domU up & running sometime today.

The Xeon system supports hyperthreading, and i've tried with and without
this, but it makes little difference - if anything without HT is
slightly slower.  When i'm doing ordinary work (e.g. setting up
file systems, running YAST), the problem manifests as a CPU load usually
somewhere over 2.5, but utilisation somewhere below 25%.

Could anyone suggest why i'm seeing this behaviour?

Thanks,
Paul Gear, Manager IT Operations, Redlands College
38 Anson Road, Wellington Point 4160, Australia
(Please send attachments in portable formats such as HTML, OASIS, or PDF.)
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