Re: [PATCH v2 repost 4/7] virtio-balloon: speed up inflate/deflate process

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 03:30:09AM +0000, Li, Liang Z wrote:
> > Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 repost 4/7] virtio-balloon: speed up inflate/deflate
> > process
> > 
> > On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 09:03:21AM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> > > On 07/26/2016 06:23 PM, Liang Li wrote:
> > > > +	vb->pfn_limit = VIRTIO_BALLOON_PFNS_LIMIT;
> > > > +	vb->pfn_limit = min(vb->pfn_limit, get_max_pfn());
> > > > +	vb->bmap_len = ALIGN(vb->pfn_limit, BITS_PER_LONG) /
> > > > +		 BITS_PER_BYTE + 2 * sizeof(unsigned long);
> > > > +	hdr_len = sizeof(struct balloon_bmap_hdr);
> > > > +	vb->bmap_hdr = kzalloc(hdr_len + vb->bmap_len, GFP_KERNEL);
> > >
> > > This ends up doing a 1MB kmalloc() right?  That seems a _bit_ big.
> > > How big was the pfn buffer before?
> > 
> > 
> > Yes I would limit this to 1G memory in a go, will result in a 32KByte bitmap.
> > 
> > --
> > MST
> 
> Limit to 1G is bad for the performance, I sent you the test result several weeks ago.
> 
> Paste it bellow:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> About the size of page bitmap, I have test the performance of filling the balloon to 15GB with a
>  16GB RAM VM.
> 
> ===============================
> 32K Byte (cover 1GB of RAM)
> 
> Time spends on inflating: 2031ms
> ---------------------------------------------
> 64K Byte (cover 2GB of RAM)
> 
> Time spends on inflating: 1507ms
> --------------------------------------------
> 512K Byte (cover 16GB of RAM)
> 
> Time spends on inflating: 1237ms
> ================================
> 
> If possible, a big bitmap is better for performance.
> 
> Liang

Earlier you said:
a. allocating pages (6.5%)
b. sending PFNs to host (68.3%)
c. address translation (6.1%)
d. madvise (19%)

Here sending PFNs to host with 512K Byte map
should be almost free.

So is something else taking up the time?


-- 
MST