Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] Migration time prediction using calc-dirty-rate

[Peter Xu]

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 05:46:40PM +0300, gudkov.andrei@huawei.com wrote:
> On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 11:46:50AM -0400, Peter Xu wrote:
> > Hi, Andrei,
> > 
> > On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 03:42:56PM +0300, Andrei Gudkov via wrote:
> > > Afterwards we tried to migrate VM after randomly selecting max downtime
> > > and bandwidth limit. Typical prediction error is 6-7%, with only 180 out
> > > of 5779 experiments failing badly: prediction error >=25% or incorrectly
> > > predicting migration success when in fact it didn't converge.
> > 
> > What's the normal size of the VMs when you did the measurements?
> 
> VM size in all experiments was 32GiB. However, since some of the pages
> are zero, the effective VM size was smaller. I checked the value of
> precopy-bytes counter after the first migration iteration. Median value
> among all experiments is 24.3GiB.
> 
> > 
> > A major challenge of convergence issues come from huge VMs and I'm
> > wondering whether those are covered in the prediction verifications.
> 
> Hmmm... My understanding is that convergence primarily depends on how
> agressive VM dirties pages and not on VM size. Small VM with agressive
> writes would be impossible to migrate without throttling. On the contrary,
> migration of the huge dormant VM will converge in just single iteration
> (although a long one). The only reason I can imagine why large VM size can
> negatively affect convergence is due to the following reasoning: larger VM
> size => bigger number of vCPUs => more memory writes per second.
> Or do you probably mean that during each iteration we perform
> KVM_CLEAR_DIRTY_LOG, which is (I suspect) linear in time and can become
> bottleneck for large VMs?

Partly yes, but not explicitly to CLEAR_LOG, more to the whole process that
may still be relevant to size of guest memory, and I was curious whether it
can keep being accurate even if mem size grows.

I assume huge VM normally should have more cores too, and it's even less
likely to be idle if there's a real customer using it (rather than in labs,
if I'm a huge VM tenant I won't want to make it idle anytime).  Then with
more cores there's definitely more chance of having higher dirty rates,
especially with the larger mem pool.

> Anyway, I will conduct experiments with large VMs.

Thanks.

> 
> I think that the easiest way to predict whether VM migration will converge
> or not is the following. Run calc-dirty-rate with calc-time equal to
> desired downtime. If it reports that the volume of dirtied memory over
> calc-time period is larger than you can copy over network in the same time,
> then you are out of luck. Alas, at the current moment calc-time accepts
> values in units of seconds, while reasonable downtime lies in range 50-300ms.
> I am preparing a separate patch that will allow to specify calc-time in
> milliseconds. I hope that this approach will be cleaner than an array of
> hardcoded values I introduced in my original patch.

I actually haven't personally gone through the details of the new
interface, but what you said sounds reasonable, and happy to read the new
version.

-- 
Peter Xu