[OmniOS-discuss] The ixgbe driver, Lindsay Lohan, and the Greek economy

Schweiss, Chip chip at innovates.com
Sat Feb 21 15:59:57 UTC 2015


I can't say I totally agree with your performance assessment.   I run Intel
X520 in all my OmniOS boxes.

Here is a capture of nfssvrtop I made while running many storage vMotions
between two OmniOS boxes hosting NFS datastores.   This is a 10 host VMware
cluster.  Both OmniOS boxes are dual 10G connected with copper twin-ax to
the in rack Nexus 5010.

VMware does 100% sync writes, I use ZeusRAM SSDs for log devices.

-Chip

2014 Apr 24 08:05:51, load: 12.64, read: 17330243 KB, swrite: 15985    KB,
awrite: 1875455  KB

Ver     Client           NFSOPS   Reads SWrites AWrites Commits   Rd_bw
SWr_bw  AWr_bw    Rd_t   SWr_t   AWr_t   Com_t  Align%

4       10.28.17.105          0       0       0       0       0
0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0

4       10.28.17.215          0       0       0       0       0
    0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0

4       10.28.17.213          0       0       0       0       0
0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0

4       10.28.16.151          0       0       0       0       0
    0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0

4       all                   1       0       0       0       0
0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0

3       10.28.16.175          3       0       3       0       0
    1      11       0    4806      48       0       0      85

3       10.28.16.183          6       0       6       0       0       3
162       0     549     124       0       0      73

3       10.28.16.180         11       0      10       0       0
    3      27       0     776      89       0       0      67

3       10.28.16.176         28       2      26       0       0      10
405       0    2572     198       0       0     100

3       10.28.16.178       4606    4602       4       0       0
294534       3       0     723      49       0       0      99

3       10.28.16.179       4905    4879      26       0       0  312208
311       0     735     271       0       0      99

3       10.28.16.181       5515    5502      13       0       0
352107      77       0      89      87       0       0      99

3       10.28.16.184      12095   12059      10       0       0
763014      39       0     249     147       0       0      99

3       10.28.58.1        15401    6040     116    6354      53  191605
474  202346     192      96     144      83      99

3       all               42574   33086     217    6354      53 *1913488*
1582  202300     348     138     153     105      99




On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 11:46 PM, W Verb <wverb73 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> Thank you for your replies.
> I tried a few things, and found the following:
>
> 1: Disabling hyperthreading support in the BIOS drops performance overall
> by a factor of 4.
> 2: Disabling VT support also seems to have some effect, although it
> appears to be minor. But this has the amusing side effect of fixing the
> hangs I've been experiencing with fast reboot. Probably by disabling kvm.
> 3: The performance tests are a bit tricky to quantify because of caching
> effects. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what is happening here. It's just
> best to describe what I'm seeing:
>
> The commands I'm using to test are
> dd if=/dev/zero of=./test.dd bs=2M count=5000
> dd of=/dev/null if=./test.dd bs=2M count=5000
> The host vm is running Centos 6.6, and has the latest vmtools installed.
> There is a host cache on an SSD local to the host that is also in place.
> Disabling the host cache didn't immediately have an effect as far as I
> could see.
>
> The host MTU set to 3000 on all iSCSI interfaces for all tests.
>
> Test 1: Right after reboot, with an ixgbe MTU of 9000, the write test
> yields an average speed over three tests of 137MB/s. The read test yields
> an average over three tests of 5MB/s.
>
> Test 2: After setting "ifconfig ixgbe0 mtu 3000", the write tests yield
> 140MB/s, and the read tests yield 53MB/s. It's important to note here that
> if I cut the read test short at only 2-3GB, I get results upwards of
> 350MB/s, which I assume is local cache-related distortion.
>
> Test 3: MTU of 1500. Read tests are up to 156 MB/s. Write tests yield
> about 142MB/s.
> Test 4: MTU of 1000: Read test at 182MB/s.
> Test 5: MTU of 900: Read test at 130 MB/s.
> Test 6: MTU of 1000: Read test at 160MB/s. Write tests are now
> consistently at about 300MB/s.
> Test 7: MTU of 1200: Read test at 124MB/s.
> Test 8: MTU of 1000: Read test at 161MB/s. Write at 261MB/s.
>
> A few final notes:
> L1ARC grabs about 10GB of RAM during the tests, so there's definitely some
> read caching going on.
> The write operations are easier to observe with iostat, and I'm seeing io
> rates that closely correlate with the network write speeds.
>
>
> Chris, thanks for your specific details. I'd appreciate it if you could
> tell me which copper NIC you tried, as well as to pass on the iSCSI tuning
> parameters.
>
> I've ordered an Intel EXPX9502AFXSR, which uses the 82598 chip instead of
> the 82599 in the X520. If I get similar results with my fiber transcievers,
> I'll see if I can get a hold of copper ones.
>
> But I should mention that I did indeed look at PHY/MAC error rates, and
> they are nil.
>
> -Warren V
>
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 7:25 PM, Chris Siebenmann <cks at cs.toronto.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> > After installation and configuration, I observed all kinds of bad
>> behavior
>> > in the network traffic between the hosts and the server. All of this bad
>> > behavior is traced to the ixgbe driver on the storage server. Without
>> going
>> > into the full troubleshooting process, here are my takeaways:
>> [...]
>>
>>  For what it's worth, we managed to achieve much better line rates on
>> copper 10G ixgbe hardware of various descriptions between OmniOS
>> and CentOS 7 (I don't think we ever tested OmniOS to OmniOS). I don't
>> believe OmniOS could do TCP at full line rate but I think we managed 700+
>> Mbytes/sec on both transmit and receive and we got basically disk-limited
>> speeds with iSCSI (across multiple disks on multi-disk mirrored pools,
>> OmniOS iSCSI initiator, Linux iSCSI targets).
>>
>>  I don't believe we did any specific kernel tuning (and in fact some of
>> our attempts to fiddle ixgbe driver parameters blew up in our face).
>> We did tune iSCSI connection parameters to increase various buffer
>> sizes so that ZFS could do even large single operations in single iSCSI
>> transactions. (More details available if people are interested.)
>>
>> > 10: At the wire level, the speed problems are clearly due to pauses in
>> > response time by omnios. At 9000 byte frame sizes, I see a good number
>> > of duplicate ACKs and fast retransmits during read operations (when
>> > omnios is transmitting). But below about a 4100-byte MTU on omnios
>> > (which seems to correlate to 4096-byte iSCSI block transfers), the
>> > transmission errors fade away and we only see the transmission pause
>> > problem.
>>
>>  This is what really attracted my attention. In our OmniOS setup, our
>> specific Intel hardware had ixgbe driver issues that could cause
>> activity stalls during once-a-second link heartbeat checks. This
>> obviously had an effect at the TCP and iSCSI layers. My initial message
>> to illumos-developer sparked a potentially interesting discussion:
>>
>>
>> http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182179/2014/10/sort/time_rev/page/16/entry/6:405/20141003125035:6357079A-4B1D-11E4-A39C-D534381BA44D/
>>
>> If you think this is a possibility in your setup, I've put the DTrace
>> script I used to hunt for this up on the web:
>>
>>         http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cks/src/omnios-ixgbe/ixgbe_delay.d
>>
>> This isn't the only potential source of driver stalls by any means, it's
>> just the one I found. You may also want to look at lockstat in general,
>> as information it reported is what led us to look specifically at the
>> ixgbe code here.
>>
>> (If you suspect kernel/driver issues, lockstat combined with kernel
>> source is a really excellent resource.)
>>
>>         - cks
>>
>
>
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