[xenpreview-dev] Extremely poor performance on SUSE 10 dom0

[Paul Gear]

Hi folks,

I don't know whether this is the intended place to discuss these issues,
but i'm having some extremely irritating performance problems trying to
get a Xen system up and running.  I'm following the SUSE Linux Xen live
migration demo HOWTO from
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Image:XEN_migration_demo_1.1.pdf

I'm using SUSE 10.0 x64-64 with xen-3.0_8259-0.1 (obtained from YOU, but
also seems to be the latest available on forge.novell.com), and whenever
i boot the Xen kernel, the system slows to a fraction of its native
performance.

My hardware is:
- Dell PE SC1425, 2 x Xeon 2.8, 2 x 2 GB DDR2 RAM, 2 x 250 GB SATA
- Dell PE 850, Pentium D 830 (3.0 GHz), 4 x 1 GB DDR2 RAM, 2 x 250 GB SATA

My intent is to use these two machines as dom0 platforms for live
migration of 5 domUs, and host the domU filesystems on iSCSI over
1000baseT, served from a dedicated NetWare 6.5 SP5 iSCSI target.

I haven't even made it to booting a domU yet, as the performance of the
system is so poor.  My first "yast2 dirinstall" is running now, and i
hope to get the domU up & running sometime today.

The Xeon system supports hyperthreading, and i've tried with and without
this, but it makes little difference - if anything without HT is
slightly slower.  When i'm doing ordinary work (e.g. setting up
filesystems, running YAST), the problem manifests as a CPU load usually
somewhere over 2.5, but utilisation somewhere below 25%.

Could anyone suggest why i'm seeing this behaviour?

Regards,
Paul Gear, Manager IT Operations, Redlands College
38 Anson Road, Wellington Point 4160, Australia
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