Re: [kvm-devel] performance with guests running 2.4 kernels (specifically RHEL3)

["David S. Ahern" <daahern@cisco.com>]

Weird. Could it be something about the hosts?

I have been running these tests on a DL320G5 with a Xeon 3050 CPU, 2.13
GHz. Host OS is Fedora 8 with the 2.6.25.3 kernel.

I'll rebuild kvm-69 with your latest patch and try the test programs again.

david


Avi Kivity wrote:
> David S. Ahern wrote:
>> The short answer is that I am still see large system time hiccups in the
>> guests due to kscand in the guest scanning its active lists. I do see
>> better response for a KVM_MAX_PTE_HISTORY of 3 than with 4. (For
>> completeness I also tried a history of 2, but it performed worse than 3
>> which is no surprise given the meaning of it.)
>>
>>
>> I have been able to scratch out a simplistic program that stimulates
>> kscand activity similar to what is going on in my real guest (see
>> attached). The program requests a memory allocation, initializes it (to
>> get it backed) and then in a loop sweeps through the memory in chunks
>> similar to a program using parts of its memory here and there but
>> eventually accessing all of it.
>>
>> Start the RHEL3/CentOS 3 guest with *2GB* of RAM (or more). The key is
>> using a fair amount of highmem. Start a couple of instances of the
>> attached. For example, I've been using these 2:
>>
>>     memuser 768M 120 5 300
>>     memuser 384M 300 10 600
>>
>> Together these instances take up a 1GB of RAM and once initialized
>> consume very little CPU. On kvm they make kscand and kswapd go nuts
>> every 5-15 minutes. For comparison, I do not see the same behavior for
>> an identical setup running on esx 3.5.
>>   
> 
> I haven't been able to reproduce this:
> 
>> [root@localhost root]# ps -elf | grep -E 'memuser|kscand'
>> 1 S root         7     1  1  75   0    -     0 schedu 10:07 ?       
>> 00:00:26 [kscand]
>> 0 S root      1464     1  1  75   0    - 196986 schedu 10:20 pts/0  
>> 00:00:21 ./memuser 768M 120 5 300
>> 0 S root      1465     1  0  75   0    - 98683 schedu 10:20 pts/0   
>> 00:00:10 ./memuser 384M 300 10 600
>> 0 S root      2148  1293  0  75   0    -   922 pipe_w 10:48 pts/0   
>> 00:00:00 grep -E memuser|kscand
> 
> The workload has been running for about half an hour, and kswapd cpu
> usage doesn't seem significant.  This is a 2GB guest running with my
> patch ported to kvm.git HEAD.  Guest is has 2G of memory.
> 
>