WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-devel

Re: [Xen-devel] I/O bound dom0 locks-ups

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 16:15 -0500, John L Griffin wrote:
> > 1) Is it most likely that this is caused by how the schedulers work or
> > is it due to using loop files?
> 
> In my experience, it's due to using loop files.  High I/O loads in the 
> guests killed dom0's interactivity and I/O response time.  Since you have 
> LVM set up already for the swap files, it should be easy to verify this 
> with an all-LVM configuration?
> 
> 

I thought of this just as I clicked on send, yes it was easy for me to
setup a test domain with a LVM backing.   With this dom0 churns along
happily using some CPU for xenblkd (normally 1-2%, bursts up to 6%).  0
% of CPU is in the "IO wait" state.  Note before I was running just
"stress --hdd 1", these numbers represent running "stress --cpu 8 --io 4
--vm 2 --vm-bytes 128M --hdd 4".
 
I knew the loop interface added some overhead, just didn't realize it
was that much.  I had only counted on it adding a few % to CPU for the
loop kernel thread.  Do any developers thing opening the loop files
O_DIRECT is possible and if so, would it help performance?  I think the
major problem is that read() and write() calls with O_DIRECT must be
aligned to the page size of the architecture.
   



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IntelliVIEW -- Interactive Reporting
Tool for open source databases. Create drag-&-drop reports. Save time
by over 75%! Publish reports on the web. Export to DOC, XLS, RTF, etc.
Download a FREE copy at http://www.intelliview.com/go/osdn_nl
_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xen-devel

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>