Re: very low performance of Xen guests

Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@xxxxxxxxx> · Mon, 15 Jun 2020 07:46:15 -0400

On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 at 14:49, Manuel Wolfshant <wolfy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

    Hello

        For the past months I've been testing upgrading my Xen hosts
      to CentOS 7 and I face an issue for which I need your help to
      solve.
        The testing machines are IBM blades, model H21 and H21XM.
      Initial tests were performed on the H21 with 16 GB RAM; during the
      last 6=7 weeks I've been using the H21XM with 64 GB. In all cases
      the guests were fully updated CentOS 7 -- initially 7.6 ( most
      recent at the time of the initial tests ), and respectively 7.8
      for the tests performed during the last 2 months.  As host I used
      initially CentOS 6 with latest kernel available in the centos virt
      repo at the time of the tests and CentOS 7 with the latest kernel
      as well. As xen versions I tested 4.8 and 4.12 ( xl info included
      below ). The storage for the last tests is a Crucial MX500 but
      results were similar when using traditional HDD.

        My problem, in short, is that the guests are extremely slow.
      For instance , in the most recent tests, a yum install kernel
      takes cca 1 min on the host and 12-15 (!!!) minutes in the guest,
      all time being spent in dracut regenerating the initramfs images.
      I've done rough tests with the storage  ( via dd if=/dev/zero
      of=a_test_file size bs=10M count=1000 ) and the speed was
      comparable between the hosts and the guests. The version of the
      kernel in use inside the guest also did not seem to make any
      difference . OTOH, sysbench (
      https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench/ ) as well as p7zip benchmark
      report for the guests a speed which is between 10% and 50% of the
      host. Quite obviously, changing the elevator had no influence
      either. 

        Here is the info which I think that should be relevant for
      the software versions in use. Feel free to ask for any additional
      info.

Is there a way to boot up a PV guest versus an HVM? I could not find a H21XM but found an HS21XM on the iBM site and that seemed to be a 4 core 8 thread cpu which looks 'old' enough that the Spectre/etc fixes to improve performance after the initial hit were not done. (Basically I was told that if the CPU was older than 2012, just turn off hyperthreading altogether to try and get back some performance.. but don't expect much). As such I would also try turning off HT on the CPU to see if that improves anything.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

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