[ovs-dev] [PATCH] ovs-ofctl: batch together OFPC_ADD requests in add-flows command

[Ansis Atteka]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 8:59 AM, Ben Pfaff <blp at nicira.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 11:54:42AM -0800, Ansis Atteka wrote:
>> Until now "ovs-ofctl add-flows ..." command sent each OFPC_ADD
>> request one by one accompanied with a barrier request.  This
>> meant that before ovs-ofctl could send next OFPC_ADD request
>> it had to wait for a barrier response that was sent together
>> with previous OFPC_ADD request.
>>
>> After this patch ovs-ofctl batches together all OFPC_ADD requests
>> and sends only a single barrier request for the last OFPC_ADD
>> request.  As a result of this patch, ovs-ofctl was able to insert
>> 60K flows in 1 second instead of 7 seconds.  This is especially
>> helpful when restarting ovs-vswitchd.
>>
>> One possible side effect of this patch is that ovs-ofctl
>> might ignore some error messages that resulted in failed
>> OFPC_ADD.
>
> That's a really nice speedup!
>
> However I'm worried about ignoring error messages.  Why not report all
> of the errors, instead of ignoring them?

Reporting all errors (i.e. printing the actual OF message replies)
might scare some users by flooding their consoles, if there would be a
lot of flow-adds that failed. However, I think it might be good idea,
as you suggested offline, to print amount of flow-adds that failed.

Will think about this a little more.