Hi Folks,

I was wondering if anyone has an pointers/suggestions on how I might increase disk performance of a HVM zvol-backed DomU?  - this is my first DomU, so hopefully its something obvious

Running bonnie++ shows the DomU's performance to be 3 orders of magnitude worse than Dom0's, which itself is half as good as when not running xVM at all (see bottom for bonnie++ results)

I'm using a 2*raidz2 SAN for the DomU backing.  I'm also using a separate disk (a compact flash) for a ZFS-based root disk.  The system has a single quad-core opteron with 8G phyical memory, but when I boot Dom0, I pass "dom0_mem=4G dom0_max_vcpus=2 dom0_vcpus_pin=true" on the "kernel$" line to limit how much mem/cpu the Dom0 can use.

When I created my DomU, I first created the zvol:

	zfs create -V 4G tank/puffy-root-disk

and then installed the OS with something like this:

	virt-install --name puffy --hvm --ram 512 --vnc \
	--file /dev/zvol/dsk/tank/puffy-root-disk \
	--cdrom /tank/install43_amd64.iso --noautoconsole \
	--os-type=unix --os-variant=openbsd4 --vcpus=1

BTW, I really didn't have to run bonnie++ to know the performance wasn't good since:
  1) the install took ~40 minutes (normally ~2 minutes)
  2) `xm top` showed the DomU as "blocked" almost the whole time


I really haven't found much info on ways to improve this, does anyone have any pointers?

PS: bonnie++ output below!

Thanks,
Kent


Bonnie++ on plain system (not Dom0)

Version 1.03d     ------ Sequential Output ------    --- Sequential Input ---    --Random-
                  -Per Char-  --Block--  -Rewrite-   --Per Char--   --Block--    --Seeks--
Machine   Size    K/sec %CP   K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP     K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP
san       
16G    74241  93   304695 80  199290 57     74182  99    601348 69    1812    5


                   ------ Sequential Create ------    -------- Random Create --------
                   -Create--  --Read---  -Delete--    -Create--  --Read---  -Delete--
         files     K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP
           16     
23050  99  +++++ +++  +++++ +++    22865  99  +++++ +++  32317  92



Bonnie++ on Dom0

Version 1.03d     ------ Sequential Output ------    --- Sequential Input ---    --Random-
                  -Per Char-  --Block--  -Rewrite-   --Per Char--   --Block--    --Seeks--
Machine   Size    K/sec %CP   K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP     K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP
san        8G    
67051  85   166574 59  126454 63     71058  96    362940 76    1645   11


                   ------ Sequential Create ------    -------- Random Create --------
                   -Create--  --Read---  -Delete--    -Create--  --Read---  -Delete--
         files     K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP
           16     
15815  99  +++++ +++  22903  99    15222  99  +++++ +++  22339  99



Bonnie++ in zvol-backed DomU  (openbsd 4.3, hvm)

Version 1.03      ------ Sequential Output ------    --- Sequential Input ---    --Random-
                  -Per Char-  --Block--  -Rewrite-   --Per Char--   --Block--    --Seeks--
Machine   Size    K/sec %CP   K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP     K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP
puffy    
300M      451   0     295   0    184   0       976   4     1521   2     26.8   1


                   ------ Sequential Create ------    -------- Random Create --------
                   -Create--  --Read---  -Delete--    -Create--  --Read---  -Delete--
         files     K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP    K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP
           16     
    8   1  +++++ +++     16   1        8   1  +++++ +++     10  0




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