On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 at 14:49, Manuel Wolfshant <wolfy at nobugconsulting.ro> wrote: > Hello > > > For the past months I've been testing upgrading my Xen hosts to CentOS > 7 and I face an issue for which I need your help to solve. > > The testing machines are IBM blades, model H21 and H21XM. Initial > tests were performed on the H21 with 16 GB RAM; during the last 6=7 weeks > I've been using the H21XM with 64 GB. In all cases the guests were fully > updated CentOS 7 -- initially 7.6 ( most recent at the time of the initial > tests ), and respectively 7.8 for the tests performed during the last 2 > months. As host I used initially CentOS 6 with latest kernel available in > the centos virt repo at the time of the tests and CentOS 7 with the latest > kernel as well. As xen versions I tested 4.8 and 4.12 ( xl info included > below ). The storage for the last tests is a Crucial MX500 but results were > similar when using traditional HDD. > > My problem, in short, is that the guests are extremely slow. For > instance , in the most recent tests, a yum install kernel takes cca 1 min > on the host and 12-15 (!!!) minutes in the guest, all time being spent in > dracut regenerating the initramfs images. I've done rough tests with the > storage ( via dd if=/dev/zero of=a_test_file size bs=10M count=1000 ) and > the speed was comparable between the hosts and the guests. The version of > the kernel in use inside the guest also did not seem to make any difference > . OTOH, sysbench ( https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench/ ) as well as > p7zip benchmark report for the guests a speed which is between 10% and 50% > of the host. Quite obviously, changing the elevator had no influence > either. > > Here is the info which I think that should be relevant for the > software versions in use. Feel free to ask for any additional info. > Is there a way to boot up a PV guest versus an HVM? I could not find a H21XM but found an HS21XM on the iBM site and that seemed to be a 4 core 8 thread cpu which looks 'old' enough that the Spectre/etc fixes to improve performance after the initial hit were not done. (Basically I was told that if the CPU was older than 2012, just turn off hyperthreading altogether to try and get back some performance.. but don't expect much). As such I would also try turning off HT on the CPU to see if that improves anything. -- Stephen J Smoogen. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-virt/attachments/20200615/a66979a6/attachment-0002.html>