Article

Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment

Authors:

Jose Renato Santos,

G. (John) Janakiraman,

Willy ZwaenepoelAuthors Info & Claims

VEE '05: Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments

Pages 13 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/1064979.1064984

Published: 11 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Virtual Machine (VM) environments (e.g., VMware and Xen) are experiencing a resurgence of interest for diverse uses including server consolidation and shared hosting. An application's performance in a virtual machine environment can differ markedly from its performance in a non-virtualized environment because of interactions with the underlying virtual machine monitor and other virtual machines. However, few tools are currently available to help debug performance problems in virtual machine environments.In this paper, we present Xenoprof, a system-wide statistical profiling toolkit implemented for the Xen virtual machine environment. The toolkit enables coordinated profiling of multiple VMs in a system to obtain the distribution of hardware events such as clock cycles and cache and TLB misses. The toolkit will facilitate a better understanding of performance characteristics of Xen's mechanisms allowing the community to optimize the Xen implementation.We use our toolkit to analyze performance overheads incurred by networking applications running in Xen VMs. We focus on networking applications since virtualizing network I/O devices is relatively expensive. Our experimental results quantify Xen's performance overheads for network I/O device virtualization in uni- and multi-processor systems. With certain Xen configurations, networking workloads in the Xen environment can suffer significant performance degradation. Our results identify the main sources of this overhead which should be the focus of Xen optimization efforts. We also show how our profiling toolkit was used to uncover and resolve performance bugs that we encountered in our experiments which caused unexpected application behavior.

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Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

VEE '05: Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments

June 2005

216 pages

ISBN:1595930477

DOI:10.1145/1064979

General Chair:
Michael Hind
IBM Research
,
Program Chair:
Jan Vitek
Purdue University

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 June 2005

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VEE05: First International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

June 11 - 12, 2005

IL, Chicago, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 235 submissions, 34%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427039
Kumar Pandey ABhaidasna H(2023)A Structural Equation Modeling Approach for HPC Inspection2023 3rd International Conference on Advance Computing and Innovative Technologies in Engineering (ICACITE)10.1109/ICACITE57410.2023.10182816(1548-1552)Online publication date: 12-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICACITE57410.2023.10182816
Shukla AKumar SShukla V(2023)Role of Virtualization in Secure NetworkCryptology and Network Security with Machine Learning10.1007/978-981-99-2229-1_36(433-439)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2229-1_36
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