Dan Price wrote:
On Tue 19 Jun 2007 at 09:37PM, Luke Schwab wrote:

Hi,

I have recently been running performance tests with zones on several
Sun servers. (280's and 880's), 2 CPU and 8CPUs respectively.

On my 280 servers (2CPU machines), I installed and booted 3 zones and
I get poor performance on across the network (400Mbps). I only
transfer data at 80% of what I can in the global zone with no zones
installed or booted (where I measured 550Mbps). That is a 20%
difference in performance. I tested with the opensource tool called
IPERF.

Not understanding the test configuration and metrics collected, there
should be nothing in zones that would have the global zone achieve
performance that is not matched by a similar test in a non-global zone or three (barring memory shortfalls or issues due to single vs. multiple
streams (not suggesting there are any here)).

Steffen


I originally thought that zones were causing my problems so I decided
to move to another type of hardware, a V880 (8 CPU) machine. When I
ran my performance tests again with 3 zones installed and booted I saw
<1% overhead in the network compared to running in the global zone
with no zones installed or booted. Both of the 880 tests ran around
860 Mbps throughput with less then 1% difference between several
scripted tests.

Can anyone explain why I see this? Both servers have gigabit NICs
installed. The only thing I can think of is that the backplane on the
servers in a bottleneck for the small 280 servers. But how could this
(or something else in the kernel space) be causing the symptoms I see
above?


I don't know offhand-- but could you please repost this CC'ing both
lists?  Otherwise we'll fail to have one conversation.  Alternatively,
responders, please follow up to this mail, which CC's both lists.

        -dp

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