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Re: [Xen-users] SMP enabled Dom0 or not?

To: deshantm@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] SMP enabled Dom0 or not?
From: Stefan de Konink <skinkie@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:56:43 +0200
Cc: xen-users <xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Todd Deshane schreef:
Hi Stefan,

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 7:27 PM, Stefan de Konink <skinkie@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:skinkie@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

    Hello,


    I wonder if the performance of a Xen machine can be increased by
    disabling SMP in the Linux kernel by default, basically having one
    of the 8 processors tied to dom0.

    In my scenario I use NFS or iSCSI as file backend. Looking at NFS
    there will be a lot of tapdrives, while in the iSCSI scenario there
    is fewer overhead in userspace processes.

    Could anyone give me a hint on the performance increase or decrease
    using SMP vs Uniprocessor?


In the original "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" they actually disabled SMP and had better IO performance. I don't know if this is still true.

Take a look at:
http://research.microsoft.com/~tharris/papers/2003-sosp.pdf
www.clarkson.edu/class/cs644/xen/files/repeatedxen-usenix04.pdf <http://www.clarkson.edu/class/cs644/xen/files/repeatedxen-usenix04.pdf>

Now I guess in 2003 there was no concept like tapdisk yet. I'll see if I can get a clean benchmark. Of 32 VMs doing the same task, SMP vs non-SMP.



Stefan

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