Re: [Xen-devel] Network performance - sending from VM to VM using TCP

[Nivedita Singhvi <niv@us.ibm.com>]

Cherie Cheung wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been simulating a network using dummynet and evaluating it

I haven't played with dummynet and don't know if there are
additional issues inherent in using dummynet itself...

> using netperf. Xen3.0-unstable is used and the VMs are
> vmlinuz-2.6.11-xenU. The simulated link is 300Mbps with 80ms RTT.
> Using netperf, I sent data using TCP from domain-0 of machine 1 to
> domain-0 of machine 2. Then I repeat the experiment, but this time
> from VM-1 of machine 1 to VM-1 of machine 2.
> 
> However, the performance across the two VMs is substantially worse
> than that across domain-0. Here's the result:
> 
> FROM VM to VM:
> TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to dw10.ucsd.edu
> (172.19.222.210) port 0 AF_INET
> Recv   Send    Send                          
> Socket Socket  Message  Elapsed              
> Size   Size    Size     Time     Throughput  
> bytes  bytes   bytes    secs.    10^6bits/sec  
> 
>  87380  65536  65536    80.28      24.83 

Your send message size is exactly your socket size. It is also
the size of the default write buffer. The kernel uses half the
buffer (very roughly) for data

Were you testing with 65536 bytes exactly for some reason?
This is stop and go traffic and normally the kernel doesn't
use the entire buffer to store data - it's roughly half...

Could you test with different send sizes?

> FROM domain-0 to domain-0:
> TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to damp.ucsd.edu
> (137.110.222.236) port 0 AF_INET
> Recv   Send    Send                          
> Socket Socket  Message  Elapsed              
> Size   Size    Size     Time     Throughput  
> bytes  bytes   bytes    secs.    10^6bits/sec  
> 
>  87380  65536  65536    80.11     280.62 
> 
> Here's the setting of the network buffer:
> 
> net.core.wmem_max = 8388608
> net.core.rmem_max = 8388608
> net.ipv4.tcp_bic = 1
> net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096        87380   8388608
> net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096        65536   8388608
> 
> Does anyone know why the performance across two VMs is so bad? Any fix
> to it? Thank you.

If you just want to improve your peformance, increase your
buffer sizes!

For example:
tcp_rmem = 4096 1398080 8388608
tcp_wmem = 4096 1398080 8388608

Were you seeing losses, queue overflows?

More importantly, how much memory do you have in the system and
how were you allocating it?


thanks,
Nivedita