Hi Daniel,
first I'd like to thank you for your speedy answer and the suggested
solution. But I think it doesn't fit to my problem.
The program I write is a sensor, which is executed by a given time
intervall. So I'm not able to cache the domain handles.
But that rises another question in my mind. Till now I assumed that I
have to get a new domain handle to receive updated information
(cpuTime) from the domain, do I? Else I could avoid a second call to
get a second domain handle.
Cheers,
Jan
On 23.05.2007, at 15:30, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 02:35:47PM +0200, Jan Michael wrote:
In the described stress situation it tooks about an average of 4
seconds to make the following to function calls, which provide me the
cpuTime of a domain
dom_old = virDomainLookupByID(conn_old, listOfDomains
[i]);
ret = virDomainGetInfo(dom_old, &info_old);
It is the virDomainLookupByID call which is killing your performance
here - it has to go to XenD, and XenD does *incredibly* stupid stuff
talking to xenstored
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2007-04/
msg00663.html
So each call takes ~1 second under normal conditions, so 4 seconds
isn't surprising under high load.
This is one of the reasons why the Xen driver in libvirt tries to talk
directly to the hypervisor if at all possible - the HV impl of most
calls is at least x1000 faster than the XenD impl.
virConnectListDomains
& virDomainGetInfo both have impls which talk to the HV so they are
very
fast to execute. The virDomainLookupByID has no HV impl, since we need
to talk to XenD to find the guests name & UUID info.
Here are the stats from my latest measurement:
old cpuTime new cpuTime
Domain-0: 3s 4294835190ms 3s 4294849513ms
stornode: 5s 580501ms 6s 4294550691ms
worknode: 6s 4294546809ms 5s 582761ms
That leads to results in cpu utilisation computation for the node,
which are much lower, around 75%, than the real value (100%) would
be.
One solution would be to add the measured time make those calls to
used cpuTime. But this in turn can cause calculations of to high
values because I don't really know in which point in time the value
is written to the structure.
The approach I'd recommend is to make sure you avoid calling
virDomainLookupByID.
If you've got a simple loop like pseduo-code...
forever() {
ids = virConnectListDomains()
foreach (id in ids) {
dom = virDomainLookupByID(id)
info = virDomainGetInfo(dom)
}
}
Then, you need to pull the virDomainLookupByID out of the inner loop.
Basically cache the 'virDomainPtr' handles - you can detect new
domains,
or shutdown domains after each call to virConnectListDomains(). So
with
correct caching of handles, you should only need to suffer the
performance
hit from virDomainLookupByID once per guest - the first time it starts
Nevertheless is xentop showing me every time the correct cpu-
utilisation of each of my domains. So that I conclude, that this
problem must have something to do with libvirt API.
Its just libvirt exposing the undering inadequacies of XenD &
XenStoreD
impl & performance :-(
Dan
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