Re: Revisiting Slow Apt (actually disk write)

[Chris Myers <chrismyers81@xxxxxxxxx>]

Out of curiosity is it all disk activity or just apt-related? Eg. how does

dd if=/dev/zero of=blah bs=1M count=512

look?

I'm running a similar-ish config as you (asrock "J" motherboards and SSD-backed LVM storage instead of regular hard drives) and thus far am not experiencing that specific issue.

I have had weird stuff happen with other motherboards however, in one case where activity on any domu (including dom0) incurred a large "st"eal, unless the VM was pinned to one specific dedicated CPU. I never did figure that one out; even went as far as turning off all ACPI stuff just in case it was interfering.

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 5:19 PM TheBearAK <thebearak@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sorry for the long message, but wanted to give a lack-of-progress report

Did a lot of troubleshooting but it hasn’t gotten me very far:


System:  SuperMicro
               Xeon E3-1230 V3 @ 3.3 Ghz
              12 GB RAM
              Physical Disk:  4 x 2 TB ST2000NM0033 - Enterprise

Dom0 OS:  Debian Buster 10.10, kernel 4.19.0-16-amd64
                  Xen 4.11

DomUs:  All run debian buster as well. they are using Disk.Img for their
swap and root drives.  All have at least 1 GB of RAM allocated.  My test
VM has 2GB.

When I ran debian wheezy, I was not having this problem.

Dom0 is fast in disk read and writes.

Problem:   DomU's Seem to be very slow disk writes.  For example, if I
just to an "apt update" this is my output:

Get:1 http://security.debian.org buster/updates InRelease [65.4 kB]
Get:2 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster InRelease [122 kB]
Get:3 http://security.debian.org buster/updates/main Sources [195 kB]
Get:4 http://security.debian.org buster/updates/main amd64 Packages [297 kB]
Get:5 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/non-free Sources [85.7 kB]
Get:6 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/main Sources [7836 kB]
Get:7 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/contrib Sources [42.5 kB]
Get:8 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/main amd64 Packages [7907 kB]
Get:9 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/main Translation-en [5968 kB]
Get:10 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/contrib amd64 Packages
[50.1 kB]
Get:11 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/contrib Translation-en
[44.2 kB]
Get:12 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/non-free amd64 Packages
[87.7 kB]
Get:13 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian buster/non-free Translation-en
[88.9 kB]
Fetched 22.7 MB in 52min 3s (7277 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done

Notice that it says "52min 3s", this is something that Dom0 takes about
3 seconds to do to the same servers.  Meaning, it is not a network issue.

What I've tried:
  - I first went through the I/O tweaks from the xen wiki pages. Zero effect

  - Moved all the DomUs off to another server except one (tester).

  - Formatted and reinstalled entire OS from scratch on Dom0.

  - Tried using LVM disk instead of disk images.   Slight improvement,
but still extremely slow.

  - Tried using physical disk, dedicating one drive entirely to the test
DomU, mounting with "phys" in the config.   This was also a slight
improvement, but still very slow disk writes.


"top" on the DomU shows WA very high while trying to get the update. 
Drops to <1 when idle.  All other "top" values are <1.

I thought I solved it by going back to an earlier kernel,
4.19.0-14-amd64, and I tried doing that again and it had zero effect
this time.


Is it possible that there is a kernel flag that is turned off that would
effect VM disk writes?   Reading seems to be normal speed.   Writing to
a network drive from the DomU is very fast as well.


Flag Info from /proc/cpu on Dom0

flags        : fpu de tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mca cmov pat clflush
acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht syscall nx

lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl nonstop_tsc cpuid pni pclmulqdq monitor
est ssse3 cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2

popcnt xsave avx f16c rdrand hypervisor lahf_lm cpuid_fault ssbd ibrs
ibpb stibp fsgsbase erms xsaveopt md_clear

--

People use duct tape to fix everything....God used nails.

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