[Xen-users] very interesting Xen Disk I/O performance

[Jia Rao <rickenrao@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I tested the xen vm disk I/O this weekend and had some interesting observations:

I ran TPC-C benchmarks (mostly random small disk read) within two VMs (PV) with the exactly the same resource and software configuration. I started the benchmarks in the two VMs at the same time (started with a script, the time difference is within several ms). The Xen VM scheduler seems always favor one VM, which results in a 50% better performance over the other VM.  I changed the seqence of the VM creation and application starting order, the specific VM always got better performance, 30%-50% better. 

What could be the reason that xen always favor a specific VM?

I ran the above test for several more times. Between each run, I purged the cached data within each VM to make the I/O demand always the same. It is interesting that the performance gap between the two VM becomes smaller and smaller. After 6 runs, the performance almost the same. 

Anyone has any idea? Does the VM scheduler scheduling VMs based on history?

I am using Xen 3.3.1, CentOS 5.1, linux 2.8.18-x86_64
Each VM has 512M, 2-VCPU not pinned. Dom0 with 512M, not pinned.
Host: dell poweredge 1950: 8G, two quad-core Intel xeon.

Thanks in advance,
Jia.
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