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Re: [Xen-users] Very slow domU network performance

To: "Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Very slow domU network performance
From: Winston Chang <winston@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 12:04:10 -0400
Cc: xen-users <xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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On Apr 4, 2006, at 1:59 PM, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:

The packet loss is as follows:
domU --> domU  0% (using 127.0.0.1)
domU --> domU  0% (using domU eth0 IP address)
dom0 --> domU  ~100% (only 7 of 38464 made it!)

Yow.

There have been a number of weird checksum problems identified in the
past with Xen's networking; a checkin was just made a day or two ago
which cleans up the checksum handling in a way which may well help here.
We'll have to see whether an updated dom0/domU kernel improves things
much.

I ran the test with the latest xen-unstable build. The results are the same.

When I ran 'xm sched-sedf 0 0 0 0 1 1' to prevent domU CPU starvation, network performance was good. The numbers in this case are the same as in my other message where I detail the results using the week-old xen build -- it could handle 90Mb/s with no datagram loss. So it looks like the checksum patches had no effect on this phenomenon; the only thing that mattered was the scheduling.

I also did some lower data-rate UDP tests with iperf (without the scheduling change). At 500 Kb/s it loses about 48% of the datagrams, at 2 Mb/s it loses 81%, and at 4 Mb/s it loses 99%. Ouch. iperf also manages to chew up 100% of CPU time doing this, so that might explain why domU chokes even at low bandwidths. Perhaps its timing is implemented with a while loop.

There's still the odd thing with domU<->dom0 communication being about 1/10 the speed of dom0<->dom0 or domU<->domU. It's roughly 170 Mb/s versus 1.7 Gb/s.


--Winston

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