Re: strange guest slowness after some time

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Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
I have a strange slowness which affects some guests after they are running for some time. "Slowness" can happen a few hours after guest start, or, a couple of days after guest start.

What do I mean by "slowness"?

This is how long it takes to log in via SSH to an unaffected guest - below a second:

$ time ssh backupuser@normal_guest exit
0.02user 0.01system 0:00.67elapsed 4%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)

Now, let's try to log in to the affected guest running on the same host - more than 12 seconds:

$ time ssh backupuser@slow_guest exit
0.02user 0.01system 0:12.56elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)

If I log in via SSH to the affected guest, any key presses lag a second or two.


This is actually weird - if I run something IO intensive on the guest, the login is much faster (running CPU-intensive tasks makes no difference):

guest# dd if=/dev/vda of=/dev/null

$ time ssh backupuser@slow_guest exit
0.02user 0.00system 0:00.70elapsed 2%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)

Also, running "ping -f <slow_guest>" helps a lot and SSH logins are fast.


Look at the difference here - 7470ms vs 139183ms (and packet losses):

# ping -f -c 10000 normal_guest

10000 packets transmitted, 10000 received, 0% packet loss, time 7470ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.443/0.709/6.487/0.112 ms, ipg/ewma 0.747/0.716 ms

# ping -f -c 10000 slow_guest

10000 packets transmitted, 9934 received, 0% packet loss, time 139183ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.470/14.337/50.455/5.409 ms, pipe 4, ipg/ewma 13.919/14.788 ms


CPU-intensive tasks are as fast as on unaffected guests.
Reading from /dev/vda is as fast as on unaffected guests.

So the only thing broken seems to be the network.


Rebooting the guest does not help - it is still slow.
The only thing that helps is stopping the guest and starting it again (i.e., stopping kvm process and starting a new one).


Is there an explanation to this phenomenon? Looks like a problem with virtio drivers somewhere, or?



The host is running kvm-83.
Affected guests are running 2.6.27.14 kernels and use virtio drivers.
The problem happens only _sometimes_. Out of 9 guests I have running on this host, I saw this problem only on 3 guests. I never saw this happening on more than one guest at a time.
All three have 512 MB memory assigned, other guests have less memory.


I'm guessing there's a problem with timers or timer interrupts.

What is the host cpu?

Does the problem occur if you pin a guest to a cpu with taskset?

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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