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[Xen-users] Unexpected memory bandwidth overhead with Xen

To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-users] Unexpected memory bandwidth overhead with Xen
From: rohan nigam <locaterohan@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 08:59:13 -0700 (PDT)
Delivery-date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:01:38 -0700
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Hello Everyone,

While benchmarking a Dell Node (Dual Socket Quad Core AMD Opteron 2354 with 8 GB of memory & CentOS 5.4 installed) , I am getting approx 25-30% overhead with xen after running the STREAM memory bandwidth benchmark using 8 threads with different compilers (gcc, pgi and icc).

These are the results with and without running xen kernel.
Centos:
Kernel Version: 2.6.18-194.17.1.el5
Kernel Version: 2.6.18-194.17.1.el5xen


Function pgcc pgcc-xen Variation (%)
Copy 17108.0186 11827.4346       
30.86613432
Scale 16179.1128 11692.2545 27.7324125
Add 16706.097 12212.2696 26.89932544
Triad 17211.552 12936.0666 24.84078949




Function icc icc-xen Variation (%)
Copy 16731.7459 11743.8163 29.81117231
Scale 16026.4231 11560.9261 27.86334151
Add 16656.4325 12077.4699 27.49065624
Triad 16701.5193 12021.5076 28.02147287




Function gcc gcc-xen Variation (%)
Copy 11762.6266 8810.7558 25.09533712
Scale 11499.5329 8611.5352 25.11404355
Add 12399.1248 9388.1446 24.28381235
Triad 12607.9727 9531.4749 24.40120924

I know there are new kernels available but I never heard of such a bad performance for bandwidth numbers for Xen. Does anyone of you know the reason?

Also, HPL on the other hand with the same setup gave a reasonably expected performance overhead for Gflops count. It was approx 3.9-4% overhead with xen.

Does Xen behave like this with memory intensive applications?

Any comments and suggestions will really help.

Thanks,
Rohan


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