[ovs-discuss] Performance counters for vswitchd

[Andrey Korolyov]

On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 8:39 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at nicira.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2014 at 02:39:18PM +0400, Andrey Korolyov wrote:
>> is there any plans around to introduce built-in performance statistics
>> for userspace switch process? Right now one is able to check memory
>> consumption statistics and it will be quite awesome to introduce kind
>> of interface for measurement of thread performance too.
>
> We have performance counters.  What do you want to measure?

For example, total cpu utilization by workers not involving external
monitoring tools. There are two cases - reactive flows, which
currently have almost linear characteristic for utilization vs flow
rate when adding unique flows on moderate speed (30k/s with six cores
of E5 series as a ceiling), and proactive mask/asterisk flows which
has sublinear characteristic even being far away from the actual
ceiling. In the second case vswitchd heavily relies on decisions made
inside module` heuristic, so same flow hit rate can produce very
different cpu utilization for userspace vswitchd.