Virtuality

Virtuality
It's like reality, but not as substantial

Monday June 09, 2008

xVM performance counters

It's possible to access performance counters through the xen console and I wonder whether it would be a good idea to have these enabled by default in the shipping xVM product? I've opened an RFE to track this idea and if anyone reading this is a user of xVM, I would be interested in hearing your opinion about this.

If the runtime overhead of maintaining the counters is sufficiently low, I'm in favour. I found them to be very useful in diagnosing a problem in 64 bit HVM guest performance and I'm sure there's a lot more information they can tell us that will help improve xVM performance.

Take a look at:

6699320 xvm/hypervisor performance slow on HVM guests

6704764 Enable performance counters by default

for more details.

(2008-06-09 06:37:28.0) Permalink

Friday November 16, 2007

Almost, but not quite, a whole year with nothing to say

Actually, I probably had loads to say, but I just haven't said it here...

I changed projects back in June and I'm now the performance lead on the xVM project. This is proving to be both fun and challenging, so I think I'd say it was the right move.

I'm at the Xen Summit in Santa Clara, California this week and I'm enjoying myself. It's good to meet members of the team in real life, rather than over the phone, and I've heard many interesting presentation about Xen.

(2007-11-16 08:03:30.0) Permalink