Re: [Xen-devel] Re: poor domU VBD performance.

[Andrew Theurer <habanero@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> My dd command was always the same: "dd if=/dev/hdb6 bs=64k count=1000" and
> it took 1.6 seconds on hdb6 and 2.2 seconds on hda1 when running in Dom0
> and it took 4.6 seconds on hdb6 and 5.8 seconds on hda1 when running on
> DomU. I did one experiment with count=10000 and it took ten times as long
> in each of the four cases.
>
> I have done the following tests:
> DomU : dd if=/dev/hdb6 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=4000 ; duration 301 sec
> DomU : dd if=/dev/hdb6 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=4000 ; duration 370 sec
>
> Dom0 : dd if=/dev/hdb6 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=4000 ; duration 115 sec
> Dom0 : dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=4000 ; duration 140 sec

OK, I have produced this with both dd and o-direct now.  On o-direct, I needed 
what was the effective dd block request size (128k) and I got similar 
results.  My results are much worse, due to that I am driving 14 disks:

dom0:   153.5 MB/sec
domU:    12.7 MB/sec

It looks like there might be a problem were we are not getting a timely 
response back from dom0 VBD driver that the io request is complete, which 
limits the number of outstanding requests to a level which cannot keep the 
disk utilized well.  If you drive enough IO outstanding requests (which can 
be done with either o-direct with large request or a much larger readahead 
setting with buffered IO), it's not an issue. 

In the domU, can you try setting the readahead size to a much larger value 
using hdparm? Something like hdparm -a 2028, then run dd?

-Andrew

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