[Xen-devel] *massive* slowdown when running oprofile in dom0

[Gianni Tedesco <gianni.tedesco@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I am running oprofile in dom0 (just profiling dom0, not VM's) and
whenever statistics collection is enabled (via opcontrol --start) the
performance of VM's drops through the floor.

For example a fresh windows(r) XP(tm) SP3 install takes 2 minutes to
boot without oprofile but a short hair under 5 minutes when stats are
being collected. It seemed even worse for installing, I had left it
going for hours before realising oprofile was the culprit (and still at
the yellow progress bar on blue background 'copying files' stage). In
general there is just a noticable 'lagginess' about everything.

I have ruled out the obvious culprits, eg: xenoprof interrupt is only
firing 800 or so times a second, oprofiled is not using all the CPU
time. So it's got to be a hypervisor/emulation thing right?

Furthermore when I disable collection with opcontrol --stop I get:

(XEN) nmi_stop: APIC not good 66560l
(XEN) CA-24901: CPU 0 fixed up 1 lost platform-timer cycles
(XEN) CPU01:              @ 00000ce3b1e78f55, 00000ce3b1e794d1
(XEN)   t 000026a6f8ef3731, 00000ce26efa7a65, 00000ce26efa79a4 <<-1 *aaac435f
(XEN)   c 000026aac1accdc5, 00000ce3b1e75cab, 00000ce3b1e73927 <<-1 *aaabcb5b
(XEN) CPU00:              @ 00000ce3b1e7ea2b, 00000ce3b1e7f2ab
(XEN)   t 000026a6f8ef35ba, 00000ce26efa7b28, 00000ce26efa79a4 <<-1 *aaac4113
(XEN)   c 000026aac1accc21, 00000ce3b1e759d3, 00000ce3b1e73927 <<-1 *aaabd388

And everything hangs for 5 seconds due to mdelay(5000) !?!?!?

Please tell me it's bad hardware...

# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 6
model name      : Genuine Intel(R) CPU 3.00GHz
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2999.892
cache size      : 2048 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 6
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu de tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr mca cmov pat clflush
acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht nx constant_tsc up pni vmx est cid
bogomips        : 6004.03
clflush size    : 64
power management:



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