[ovs-dev] OVN: Possible scalability bottleneck around the port binding table

Ben Pfaff blp at nicira.com
Tue Aug 25 15:17:22 UTC 2015


On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 11:46:36AM +0300, Liran Schour wrote:
> Proposed solutions: both options are based on allowing the vSwitch 
> (ovn-controller) to monitor only a subset of the port binding table. You 
> can think about it as a compromise between the fully pro-active and the 
> re-active approaches (push vs. pull).
> 
> Option 1: Extend OVSDB protocol to include a new method to allow the 
> client to monitor a table under a specific condition and being updated 
> only on rows that satisfy the condition ( e.g "datapath"== XYZ ). This 
> will allow each vSwitch in OVN to monitor only a subset of the logical 
> datapaths.

Yes, this makes sense, and it is already on the to-do list.

*** Reducing amount of data sent to clients.

    Currently, whenever a row monitored by a client changes,
    ovsdb-server sends the client every monitored column in the row,
    even if only one column changes.  It might be valuable to reduce
    this only to the columns that changes.

    Also, whenever a column changes, ovsdb-server sends the entire
    contents of the column.  It might be valuable, for columns that
    are sets or maps, to send only added or removed values or
    key-values pairs.

    Currently, clients monitor the entire contents of a table.  It
    might make sense to allow clients to monitor only rows that
    satisfy specific criteria, e.g. to allow an ovn-controller to
    receive only Logical_Flow rows for logical networks on its hypervisor.



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