[libvirt] virt-top version bump in EPEL5

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 06:06:08PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 04:58:42PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 05:46:03PM +0200, Wolfram Schlich wrote:
> > > * Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> [2010-09-06 17:23]:
> > > > On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 05:06:55PM +0200, Wolfram Schlich wrote:
> > > > > We are experiencing a problem with virt-top on our RHEL5 virthosts.
> > > > > 
> > > > > On a heavily loaded virthost, virt-top is damn slow -- it takes 4-5s
> > > > > to update and imposes a noticeable load on the dom0 as well
> > > > > (xenstored shows up in top eating all CPU for some seconds).
> > > > > xentop seems to impose *much* less load on the dom0.
> > > > > Is there something I can do about it?
> > > > >
> > > > > Another problem: 0.3.3.1 shows RDRQ/WRRQ/RXBY/TXBY after some seconds
> > > > > whereas 1.0.4 does not...?
> > > > 
> > > > I bet both of these will be libvirt issues.
> > > > 
> > > > Try running:
> > > > 
> > > > virsh list --all
> > > 
> > > Takes around 2-4s depending on dom0 load.
> > 
> > CC-ing to libvir-list.  There may be a better way now for virt-top to
> > get the list of domains, but if 'virsh list --all' is also slow, then
> > it's probably a generic libvirt problem.
> > 
> > > > virsh domblkstat DomainName hda
> > > 
> > > s/hda/xvda/ I guess :)
> > > This one is quite fast, below 0.2s.
> > > 
> > > > virsh domifstat DomainName vnet0
> > > 
> > > This takes around 0.1s most of the time, but sometimes around 1.0s.
> > > 
> > > > etc.
> > > > 
> > > > If those commands (done in a suitable loop) also cause load on the
> > > > dom0, and if domblkstat/domifstat don't show stats, then it's down to
> > > > libvirt.
> > > > 
> > > > virt-top is a simple little program that just exercises those libvirt
> > > > APIs ...
> > > 
> > > Hmm :/ So I guess we're better off with xentop...
> > 
> > We should be able to have performance very close to xentop.  After
> > all, libvirt makes exactly the same direct hypervisor calls.
> 
> It depends on which API calls virt-top makes. The virConnectListDomains
> goes to XenStore (fast), virDomainLookupByID/UUID go to HV (fast). The
> possibly bad ones are virConnectDefinedDomains goes to /etc/xen (fast)
> or XenD (slow) and  virDomainLookupByName goes to XenD (slow).
> 
> virsh list --all is slow because inactive domains requires using those
> latter two APIs which hit XenD. virt-top/xentop shouldn't care about
> inactive domains though, since they've obviously no interesting CPU
> time to report :-)

Unfortunately we do list them :-(

> In a perfect world you'd also want to use the lifecycle events, so you
> only need call ListDomains/ListDefinedDomains once, and then get explicit
> notifications of new virDomainPtr instances without any need todo a lookup.

OK, we might need to move to this model.  Is it workable now?  In RHEL 5?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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