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Re: [Xen-devel] unconditionally enable the trace buffer

To: Ian Pratt <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] unconditionally enable the trace buffer
From: Rob Gardner <rob.gardner@xxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:45:37 -0600
Cc: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Ian Pratt wrote:

* ability to turn on/off via hypercall
Not currently implemented, but would not be difficult to add.
Just as an aside I'm not sure this matters: From what Rob's told me, having the (inline) trace() calls in there produces the same overhead whether tracing is active or not. I guess it makes sense; once you've incurred the overhead of having the function there and evaluating the "is tracing on" conditional, you might as well have stored a few values also ;-)
We could cache miss on reading the tracebuffer producer counter and
tracebuffer base address, so its not totally a done deal.

I don't have a big worry about performance, but I'd feel more
comfortable to see a more realistic assesment of overhead. Comparing
results from ttcp in a domU with 128k sock buf and the MTU set to 552
bytes should do it.

I just completed some benchmarks using ttcp as Ian suggests. I was surprised by the results, but essentially, Ian's intuition n this case may be right on the money. I tested three cases:
 1. trace buffers turned off, that is not compiled in
 2. trace buffers compiled in and turned on
 3. trace buffers compiled in but disabled
Cases 1 and 3 show no performance difference at all, but case 2 does show a non-trivial degradation.

Details of the benchmarking: ttcp using 128k buffers to send data to a domU from another machine using a gigabit network. 2gb were transferred in each run, and 10 runs were performed for each case. Dom0 and domU together used up just about all of a cpu, and experienced 2000-2500 context switches per second to handle 40-50,000 I/O's per second. Please note that the additional trace events for XenMon were enabled in this system (case 2) so each of those 50,000 I/O's each second generates a trace record!

I conclude the following from this:
- there is no penalty for simply having the trace buffer code compiled into xen
- there is a penalty for enabling tracing
- therefore, the ability to turn tracing on/off via a hypercall is definitely important

Rob





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