[ovs-dev] [PATCH] ofproto: Optimise OpenFlow flow expiry

Simon Horman horms at verge.net.au
Thu Jan 17 00:42:29 UTC 2013


On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 01:59:21PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 01:20:57PM +0900, Simon Horman wrote:
> > Optimise OpenFlow flow expiry by placing expirable flows on a list.
> > This optimises scanning of flows for expiry in two ways:
> > 
> > * Empirically list traversal appears faster than the code it replaces.
> > 
> >   With 1,000,000 flows present an otherwise idle system I observed CPU
> >   utilisation of around 20% with the existing code but around 10% with
> >   this new code.
> > 
> > * Flows that will never expire are not traversed.
> > 
> >   This addresses a case seen in the field.
> 
> This version looks better.  I still have a few comments, but before
> that, may I ask a little bit about the situation in which the
> performance improvement was observed?  In this situation, about how
> many of the 1,000,000 flows were actually expirable, that is, had
> either a hard timeout or an idle timeout?  That is, is the performance
> improvement due more to the first or the second bullet you list above?
> If none of the flows were expirable, then I guess it was the second;
> if all of them were, then I guess it was the first; and otherwise it
> is something in between.
> 
> Basically I'm wondering if we should do something to make flow table
> traversal faster, independent of expiration.

Hi Ben,

the primary aim of this patch was to address a performance issue that
was noticed when inserting 100,000 flows none of which were expirable.
I have been told this is representative of an expected use-case.

During my testing I used 1,000,000 flows instead of 100,000 in order to
make the CPU utilisation more pronounced and easier to observe.

In the course of my testing I tested 1,000,000 flows none of which were
expirable and in that case CPU utilisation was dramatically reduced to
approximately 0. This seems to be a good outcome for the use-case
originally reported.

In the course of testing I also tested 1,000,000 flows all of which
were expirable. This was primarily to see if there were any regressions.
In the course of this test I noticed that there seemed to be some
reduction in CPU utilisation. However this was just a side effect and
not an aim of my work. I should have placed it as the second bullet
in my commit message and noted that it was a side effect.



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