Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Andreas Kinzler]

Hello Jeremy + Konrad + all kernel devs,

while it is great to see that vanilla dom0 seems to work, the 
performance breakdown compared to xenified 2.6.34 (from opensuse) is 
huge. Here are my benchmarks:

Xen 4.1.1, Xeon E5620, Supermicro X8DTi-F, 12 GB RAM, dom0 2 VCPUs

time emerge apache:

		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0	2.6.34.10-dom0
	real    1m0.560s	0m59.971s	0m47.689s
	user    0m40.939s	0m40.619s	0m41.355s
	sys     0m18.865s	0m18.305s	0m11.441s

time make -j4 (3.2.12 linux compile):

		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0	2.6.34.10-dom0
	real    5m8.793s	5m4.888s	4m20.576s
	user    8m1.746s	7m59.726s	7m10.375s
	sys     1m39.010s	1m32.994s	0m56.304s

Regards Andreas

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[David Vrabel]

On 02/05/12 14:11, Andreas Kinzler wrote:
> Hello Jeremy + Konrad + all kernel devs,
> 
> while it is great to see that vanilla dom0 seems to work, the
> performance breakdown compared to xenified 2.6.34 (from opensuse) is
> huge. Here are my benchmarks:
> 
> Xen 4.1.1, Xeon E5620, Supermicro X8DTi-F, 12 GB RAM, dom0 2 VCPUs
> 
> time emerge apache:
> 
>         3.2.12-dom0    3.3.4-dom0    2.6.34.10-dom0
>     real    1m0.560s    0m59.971s    0m47.689s
>     user    0m40.939s    0m40.619s    0m41.355s
>     sys     0m18.865s    0m18.305s    0m11.441s

Can you apply 7eb7ce4d2e8991aff4ecb71a81949a907ca755ac "xen: correctly
check for pending events when restoring irq flags"[1] and see how much
it helps?

This patch is in 3.4-rc5 and is queued for 3.3.5.

David

[1]
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=commit;h=7eb7ce4d2e8991aff4ecb71a81949a907ca755ac

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Andreas Kinzler]

On 02.05.2012 15:30, David Vrabel wrote:
> Can you apply 7eb7ce4d2e8991aff4ecb71a81949a907ca755ac "xen: correctly
> check for pending events when restoring irq flags"[1] and see how much
> it helps?

There is some minor improvement - but it is still far away from xenified 
2.6.34.10.

time emerge apache:

		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0 (w. patch)	2.6.34.10-dom0
	real    1m0.560s	0m59.971s (0m58.029s)	0m47.689s
	user    0m40.939s	0m40.619s (0m40.291s)	0m41.355s
	sys     0m18.865s	0m18.305s (0m16.837s)	0m11.441s

time make -j4 (3.2.12 linux compile):

		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0 (w. patch)	2.6.34.10-dom0
	real    5m8.793s	5m4.888s  (5m1.408s)	4m20.576s
	user    8m1.746s	7m59.726s (7m57.534s)	7m10.375s
	sys     1m39.010s	1m32.994s (1m29.518s)	0m56.304s

Regards Andreas

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[George Dunlap]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 6:01 PM, Andreas Kinzler <ml-xen-devel@hfp.de> wrote:
> On 02.05.2012 15:30, David Vrabel wrote:
>>
>> Can you apply 7eb7ce4d2e8991aff4ecb71a81949a907ca755ac "xen: correctly
>> check for pending events when restoring irq flags"[1] and see how much
>> it helps?
>
>
> There is some minor improvement - but it is still far away from xenified
> 2.6.34.10.

Just FYI, the reason Ian suggested making the same comparison for
native is that the performance of linux overall on bare-metal has also
suffered since 2.6.34.  It's likely that a non-trivial amount of the
performance regression is due to moving from 2.6.34 to 3.{2,3}, over
and above whatever regressions may have happened when moving from
xenified to pvops.

 -George

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Andreas Kinzler]

On 03.05.2012 10:32, George Dunlap wrote:
>>> Can you apply 7eb7ce4d2e8991aff4ecb71a81949a907ca755ac "xen: correctly
>>> check for pending events when restoring irq flags"[1] and see how much
>>> it helps?
>> There is some minor improvement - but it is still far away from xenified
>> 2.6.34.10.
> Just FYI, the reason Ian suggested making the same comparison for
> native is that the performance of linux overall on bare-metal has also
> suffered since 2.6.34.  It's likely that a non-trivial amount of the
> performance regression is due to moving from 2.6.34 to 3.{2,3}, over
> and above whatever regressions may have happened when moving from
> xenified to pvops.

I took his suggestion serious - and actually I had performed these tests 
(see my other post). Unfortunately, the minor loss on bare-metal and the 
huge loss on xenified 2.6.34 vs pvops 3.x show that the problem is 
clearly with the Xen changes and not the bare-metal changes.

Regards Andreas

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Ian Campbell]

On Wed, 2012-05-02 at 14:11 +0100, Andreas Kinzler wrote:
> Hello Jeremy + Konrad + all kernel devs,
> 
> while it is great to see that vanilla dom0 seems to work, the 
> performance breakdown compared to xenified 2.6.34 (from opensuse) is 
> huge. Here are my benchmarks:

There were a couple of performance fixes posted recently, one of them
was "xen: correctly check for pending events when restoring irq flags"
from David Vrabel, which is now in mainline as 7eb7ce4d2e89 and marked
for stable backport. The other was something to do with blk i/o
performance from Stefano Stabellini which I don't have a handy reference
too or status on (hopefully Konrad does though).

I think those will undoubtedly help although I think performance tuning
of the upstream dom0 kernel is still something we need to do more of in
the short term.

> Xen 4.1.1, Xeon E5620, Supermicro X8DTi-F, 12 GB RAM, dom0 2 VCPUs
> 
> time emerge apache:
> 
> 		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0	2.6.34.10-dom0
> 	real    1m0.560s	0m59.971s	0m47.689s
> 	user    0m40.939s	0m40.619s	0m41.355s
> 	sys     0m18.865s	0m18.305s	0m11.441s
> 
> time make -j4 (3.2.12 linux compile):
> 
> 		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0	2.6.34.10-dom0
> 	real    5m8.793s	5m4.888s	4m20.576s
> 	user    8m1.746s	7m59.726s	7m10.375s
> 	sys     1m39.010s	1m32.994s	0m56.304s

Did you happen to also compare 3.2.12 and 2.6.34.10 running these
workloads natively?

Ian.

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Andreas Kinzler]

On 02.05.2012 15:31, Ian Campbell wrote:
> Did you happen to also compare 3.2.12 and 2.6.34.10 running these
> workloads natively?

Yes, I tested against 2.6.32.x. Differences exist, but are minor.

time emerge apache:

		2.6.32.36	3.2.12		3.3.4
	real    0m31.419s	0m34.770s	0m35.210s
	user    0m45.479s	0m38.994s	0m39.750s
	sys     0m6.488s	0m4.584s	0m4.928s

make -j4:

		2.6.32.36	3.2.12		3.3.4
	real    2m3.531s	2m4.423s	2m2.348s
	user    7m45.817s	7m21.456s	7m18.291s
	sys     0m35.194s	0m28.758s	0m28.974s

Regards Andreas

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Ian Campbell]

On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 11:43 +0100, Andreas Kinzler wrote:
> On 02.05.2012 15:31, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > Did you happen to also compare 3.2.12 and 2.6.34.10 running these
> > workloads natively?
> 
> Yes, I tested against 2.6.32.x. Differences exist, but are minor.

Good to know, thanks for testing

The other potential Xen perf thing which just occurred to to me is the
ACPI power management stuff which the xen-acpi-processor patches in
3.4-rcN are fixing. These are necessary to enable things like turbo mode
so have a pretty large perf impact.

Are you able to try the latest 3.4-rc kernel?

I'm not sure if backports to the kernels you are running exist or not,
Konrad? 

Ian.

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk]

On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 11:51:57AM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 11:43 +0100, Andreas Kinzler wrote:
> > On 02.05.2012 15:31, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > Did you happen to also compare 3.2.12 and 2.6.34.10 running these
> > > workloads natively?
> > 
> > Yes, I tested against 2.6.32.x. Differences exist, but are minor.
> 
> Good to know, thanks for testing
> 
> The other potential Xen perf thing which just occurred to to me is the
> ACPI power management stuff which the xen-acpi-processor patches in
> 3.4-rcN are fixing. These are necessary to enable things like turbo mode
> so have a pretty large perf impact.
> 
> Are you able to try the latest 3.4-rc kernel?
> 
> I'm not sure if backports to the kernels you are running exist or not,
> Konrad? 

No. But they should be easy to cherry-pick. However, I would suggest
trying v3.4-rc6 first and seeing if that makes a difference.

> 
> Ian.

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Andreas Kinzler]

On 03.05.2012 12:51, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 11:43 +0100, Andreas Kinzler wrote:
>> On 02.05.2012 15:31, Ian Campbell wrote:
>>> Did you happen to also compare 3.2.12 and 2.6.34.10 running these
>>> workloads natively?
>> Yes, I tested against 2.6.32.x. Differences exist, but are minor.
>
> Good to know, thanks for testing
>
> The other potential Xen perf thing which just occurred to to me is the
> ACPI power management stuff which the xen-acpi-processor patches in
> 3.4-rcN are fixing. These are necessary to enable things like turbo mode
> so have a pretty large perf impact.
>
> Are you able to try the latest 3.4-rc kernel?

Yes, meanwhile I tried 3.4-rc7. There is some improvement but still a good bit away from 
2.6.34 xenified:

time emerge apache:

		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0 (w. patch)	3.4.0-rc7	2.6.34.10-dom0
	real    1m0.560s	0m59.971s (0m58.029s)	0m55.000s	0m47.689s
	user    0m40.939s	0m40.619s (0m40.291s)	0m37.846s	0m41.355s
	sys     0m18.865s	0m18.305s (0m16.837s)	0m16.041s	0m11.441s

time make -j4 (3.2.12 linux compile):

		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0 (w. patch)	3.4.0-rc7	2.6.34.10-dom0
	real    5m8.793s	5m4.888s  (5m1.408s)	4m48.839s	4m20.576s
	user    8m1.746s	7m59.726s (7m57.534s)	7m40.129s	7m10.375s
	sys     1m39.010s	1m32.994s (1m29.518s)	1m20.993s	0m56.304s

Regards Andreas

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Wed, 2 May 2012, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-05-02 at 14:11 +0100, Andreas Kinzler wrote:
> > Hello Jeremy + Konrad + all kernel devs,
> > 
> > while it is great to see that vanilla dom0 seems to work, the 
> > performance breakdown compared to xenified 2.6.34 (from opensuse) is 
> > huge. Here are my benchmarks:
> 
> There were a couple of performance fixes posted recently, one of them
> was "xen: correctly check for pending events when restoring irq flags"
> from David Vrabel, which is now in mainline as 7eb7ce4d2e89 and marked
> for stable backport. The other was something to do with blk i/o
> performance from Stefano Stabellini which I don't have a handy reference
> too or status on (hopefully Konrad does though).

It is this one:

http://marc.info/?l=xen-devel&m=133526478318742&w=2

but it is only relevant if you are running the benchmark in a VM, with
the disk image stored in a file.

Re: Poor performance with Linux 3.x as dom0

[Stefano Stabellini]

On Wed, 2 May 2012, Andreas Kinzler wrote:
> Hello Jeremy + Konrad + all kernel devs,
> 
> while it is great to see that vanilla dom0 seems to work, the 
> performance breakdown compared to xenified 2.6.34 (from opensuse) is 
> huge. Here are my benchmarks:
> 

Thanks for running benchmarks!


> Xen 4.1.1, Xeon E5620, Supermicro X8DTi-F, 12 GB RAM, dom0 2 VCPUs
> 
> time emerge apache:
> 
> 		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0	2.6.34.10-dom0
> 	real    1m0.560s	0m59.971s	0m47.689s
> 	user    0m40.939s	0m40.619s	0m41.355s
> 	sys     0m18.865s	0m18.305s	0m11.441s
> 
> time make -j4 (3.2.12 linux compile):
> 
> 		3.2.12-dom0	3.3.4-dom0	2.6.34.10-dom0
> 	real    5m8.793s	5m4.888s	4m20.576s
> 	user    8m1.746s	7m59.726s	7m10.375s
> 	sys     1m39.010s	1m32.994s	0m56.304s

Just for clarity, are you running this in dom0 (not in a VM), correct?

If you are running the test in a VM, is it a PV or an HVM guest? What is
the guest kernel version? What is the vcpu and memory configuration?
And finally, what are you using as the disk image (file or LVM)?