Re: Regression in throughput between kvm guests over virtual bridge

[Wei Xu <wexu@redhat.com>]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 03:59:54PM -0500, Matthew Rosato wrote:
> >> This case should be quite similar with pkgten, if you got improvement with
> >> pktgen, usually it was also the same for UDP, could you please try to disable
> >> tso, gso, gro, ufo on all host tap devices and guest virtio-net devices? Currently
> >> the most significant tests would be like this AFAICT:
> >>
> >> Host->VM     4.12    4.13
> >>  TCP:
> >>  UDP:
> >> pktgen:
> >>
> >> Don't want to bother you too much, so maybe 4.12 & 4.13 without Jason's patch should
> >> work since we have seen positive number for that, you can also temporarily skip
> >> net-next as well.
> > 
> > Here are the requested numbers, averaged over numerous runs --  guest is
> > 4GB+1vcpu, host uperf/pktgen bound to 1 host CPU + qemu and vhost thread
> > pinned to other unique host CPUs.  tso, gso, gro, ufo disabled on host
> > taps / guest virtio-net devs as requested:
> > 
> > Host->VM	4.12		4.13
> > TCP:		9.92Gb/s	6.44Gb/s
> > UDP:		5.77Gb/s	6.63Gb/s
> > pktgen:		1572403pps	1904265pps
> > 
> > UDP/pktgen both show improvement from 4.12->4.13.  More interesting,
> > however, is that I am seeing the TCP regression for the first time from
> > host->VM.  I wonder if the combination of CPU binding + disabling of one
> > or more of tso/gso/gro/ufo is related.
> > 
> >>
> >> If you see UDP and pktgen are aligned, then it might be helpful to continue
> >> the other two cases, otherwise we fail in the first place.
> > 
> 
> I continued running many iterations of these tests between 4.12 and
> 4.13..  My throughput findings can be summarized as:

Really nice to have these numbers.

> 
> VM->VM case:
> UDP:  roughly equivalent
> TCP:  Consistent regression (5-10%)
> 
> VM->Host
> Both UDP and TCP traffic are roughly equivalent.

The patch improves performance for Rx from guest point of view, so the Tx
would be no big difference since the Rx packets are far less than Tx in 
this case.

> 
> Host->VM
> UDP+pktgen: improvement (5-10%), but inconsistent
> TCP: Consistent regression (25-30%)

Maybe we can try to figure out this case first since it is the shortest path,
can you have a look at TCP statistics and paste a few outputs between tests?
I am suspecting there are some retransmitting, zero window probing, etc.

> 
> Host->VM UDP and pktgen seemed to show improvement in some runs, and in
> others seemed to mirror 4.12-level performance.
> 
> The TCP regression for VM->VM is no surprise, we started with that.
> It's still consistent, but smaller in this specific environment.

Right, there are too many facts might influent the performance.

> 
> The TCP regression in Host->VM is interesting because I wasn't seeing it
> consistently before binding CPUs + disabling tso/gso/gro/ufo.  Also
> interesting because of how large it is -- By any chance can you see this
> regression on x86 with the same configuration?

Had a quick test and it seems I also got drop on x86 without tso,gro,..., data
with/without tso,gso,..., will check out tcp statistics and let you know soon.

4.12  
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------
    master            32.34s   112.63GB    29.91Gb/s      4031090        0.00
    master            32.33s    32.58GB     8.66Gb/s      1166014        0.00
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------

4.13
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    master            32.35s   119.17GB    31.64Gb/s      4265190        0.00
    master            32.33s    27.02GB     7.18Gb/s       967007        0.00
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wei