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    Epyc VM to VM networking slow

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Compute
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    • olivierlambertO Offline
      olivierlambert Vates 🪐 Co-Founder CEO
      last edited by

      FYI, we are discussing with AMD and another external company to find the culprit, active work is in the pipes.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
      • bleaderB Online
        bleader Vates 🪐 XCP-ng Team @timewasted
        last edited by

        @timewasted Thanks for sharing, as long as we haven't found a solution, it is always good to have more feedback, so thanks for that.

        For FreeBSD it usus the same principle of network driver, but it seems to have lower performances, not only on EPYC system, this could be another investigation for later 🙂

        I am indeed surprised by your vm/host results, I generally get a way greater performance there in my tests. I agree the management NIC speed should not impact it at all… You said no tuning so I guess no pinning or anything, therefore I don't really see why that is right now.

        M 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • M Offline
          manilx @bleader
          last edited by

          @bleader I stumpled upon this thread and this issue kept me wondering so I did a quick test on our systems:

          Running iperf3 on ou HP's with AMD EPYC 7543P cpu's, debian12 to debian12 vm I get
          iperf3 -c 192.168.1.19 -P 10
          ScreenShot 2024-04-02 at 10.10.40.png

          iperf3 -c 192.168.1.19
          ScreenShot 2024-04-02 at 10.11.40.png

          Same on a HP with Intel Xeon E5-2667
          iperf3 -c 192.168.1.113 -P 10
          ScreenShot 2024-04-02 at 10.16.52.png

          iperf3 -c 192.168.1.113
          ScreenShot 2024-04-02 at 10.17.42.png

          FREAKY!

          Doesn't affect us because we don't have inter-VM traffic to speak off.

          bleaderB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • bleaderB Online
            bleader Vates 🪐 XCP-ng Team @manilx
            last edited by bleader

            @manilx thanks for the additional results, and yes, it is a pretty big issue, but even with multiple people looking at it or trying to help out, we were not able to pinpoint the root cause yet 😞

            N 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • N Offline
              nicols @bleader
              last edited by

              This is over 4 months old, and is affecting a LOT of my customers.
              It is a BIG problem for my company.

              Is there anything that we can do to help resolve this?

              S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • S Offline
                Seneram @nicols
                last edited by

                @nicols Hello, you are not alone in this. We have delayed the deployment of our core ISP routing as virtual routers due to this.

                We have an XOA premium and xcp-ng enterprise subscription and an open case on this.

                I cannot go into detail about what is being said in there but i can say that the approach @olivierlambert and vates have is very good and they have my full confidence on this one.

                @manilx i can say this affects all vm traffic as we have vm out to switch over to a second hardware host into a VM there and we see the limit there aswell just the roof is twice as high as inside the same HW box

                Either way. Vates is VERY well aware of how serious this is and are taking good efforts to fix it.

                M 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • M Offline
                  manilx @Seneram
                  last edited by

                  @Seneram True. Just tested 2 debian12 sitting on 2 EPYC host:

                  10 parallel tests:

                  ScreenShot 2024-04-02 at 10.57.11.png

                  One:
                  ScreenShot 2024-04-02 at 10.58.12.png

                  Bummer! Worse than I thought. But Vates will certainly get to the bottom of this.

                  ForzaF 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • ForzaF Offline
                    Forza @manilx
                    last edited by

                    Just for additional insights, have tests been made with different BIOS/firmware settings? Especially EPYC firmware has a lot of settings affecting internal latency vs throughput for different workloads. I recently deployed an EPYC 2x48c/96t system for a simulation software. The changes in the firmware could make 20% difference in rendering time for this application. Not saying it is a root cause, but it could possibly improve the situation here. My guess is that much of the issue is due to bad latency and erroneous scheduling leading to additional latency.

                    S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • S Offline
                      Seneram @Forza
                      last edited by

                      @Forza We have tried all the settings avail to tweak on our hardware, We have a full big twin chassi we have dedicated to vates doing testing of this issue and the first roughly month was spent going over settings together with vates and making sure everything was tweaked properly.

                      AMD is involved themself and if anyone knows AMD firmware settings and tweaking it would be AMD.

                      In all seriousness it is a very good suggestion but it has been looked into and unfortunately do minimal or no difference.

                      ForzaF 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • ForzaF Offline
                        Forza @Seneram
                        last edited by

                        @Seneram thanks, was guessing it was the case. I hope the issue is resolved soon. 🙏

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • olivierlambertO Offline
                          olivierlambert Vates 🪐 Co-Founder CEO
                          last edited by

                          Please note that we are actively investigating to it, and believe me it's costly (25k€ already invested to track this down). So as you can see, it's a priority and something we are actively working on. AMD is also aware of it.

                          J 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
                          • gskgerG Offline
                            gskger Top contributor @bleader
                            last edited by gskger

                            @bleader Had some time to test this on an AMD system (HP T740 Thin Client). Hopefully it helps a bit, even it is not an Epyc CPU.

                            Host:

                            • CPU: AMD Ryzen Embedded V1756B
                            • Number of sockets: 1
                            • CPU pinning: no
                            • XCP-NG version: 8.3 beta 1 (updated with yum update as of today)
                            • Output of xl info -n:
                            [22:05 hpt740 ~]# xl info -n
                            host                   : hpt740
                            release                : 4.19.0+1
                            version                : #1 SMP Wed Jan 24 17:19:11 CET 2024
                            machine                : x86_64
                            nr_cpus                : 8
                            max_cpu_id             : 15
                            nr_nodes               : 1
                            cores_per_socket       : 4
                            threads_per_core       : 2
                            cpu_mhz                : 3244.038
                            hw_caps                : 178bf3ff:7ed8320b:2e500800:244033ff:0000000f:209c01a9:00000000:00000500
                            virt_caps              : pv hvm hvm_directio pv_directio hap shadow
                            total_memory           : 30636
                            free_memory            : 17610
                            sharing_freed_memory   : 0
                            sharing_used_memory    : 0
                            outstanding_claims     : 0
                            free_cpus              : 0
                            cpu_topology           :
                            cpu:    core    socket     node
                              0:       0        0        0
                              1:       0        0        0
                              2:       1        0        0
                              3:       1        0        0
                              4:       2        0        0
                              5:       2        0        0
                              6:       3        0        0
                              7:       3        0        0
                            device topology        :
                            device           node
                            No device topology data available
                            numa_info              :
                            node:    memsize    memfree    distances
                               0:     34803      17610      10
                            xen_major              : 4
                            xen_minor              : 13
                            xen_extra              : .5-10.58
                            xen_version            : 4.13.5-10.58
                            xen_caps               : xen-3.0-x86_64 hvm-3.0-x86_32 hvm-3.0-x86_32p hvm-3.0-x86_64
                            xen_scheduler          : credit
                            xen_pagesize           : 4096
                            platform_params        : virt_start=0xffff800000000000
                            xen_changeset          : 708e83f0e7d1, pq 8e58b4872724
                            xen_commandline        : watchdog ucode=scan dom0_max_vcpus=1-8 crashkernel=256M,below=4G console=vga vga=mode-0x0311 dom0_mem=4294967296B,max:4294967296B
                            cc_compiler            : gcc (GCC) 11.2.1 20210728 (Red Hat 11.2.1-1)
                            cc_compile_by          : mockbuild
                            cc_compile_domain      : [unknown]
                            cc_compile_date        : Thu Jan 25 10:20:16 CET 2024
                            build_id               : ae0904d024e04d4daf2ecdfddc37ea146f48d7e1
                            xend_config_format     : 4
                            

                            Server and client VMs are both Debian 12 (Linux 6.1.0-18-amd64) with 4 cores and 4G RAM. xentop is client/server/dom0

                            V2V 1T   90/140/210   5.1 Gbits/sec
                            V2V 4T  150/220/260   8.1 Gbits/sec 
                            H2V 1T    0/170/210  10.2 Gbits/sec*
                            H2V 4T    0/310/340  11.9 Gbits/sec*
                            *: with some spread of cpu utilization and throughput
                            

                            Minimum of three runs per test scenario.

                            bleaderB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • olivierlambertO Offline
                              olivierlambert Vates 🪐 Co-Founder CEO
                              last edited by

                              We made tests on Ryzen CPUs and we couldn't really reproduce the problem: it seems to be EPYC specific.

                              bleaderB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                              • bleaderB Online
                                bleader Vates 🪐 XCP-ng Team @olivierlambert
                                last edited by

                                @olivierlambert We did talk in DM before, I told him any data is always welcome, especially as I didn't even know this range of CPUs 🙂

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • bleaderB Online
                                  bleader Vates 🪐 XCP-ng Team @gskger
                                  last edited by

                                  @gskger It does seem quite lower than the 5950x and the 7600 we tested, but:

                                  • it is a zen1 if I'm not mistaken
                                  • in the 4 threads case, with 8 threads on the physical CPU, the VMs and dom0 are actually sharing ressources
                                  • for single thread I guess the generation and memory speed could explain the difference.

                                  I would say that this confirms these ryzen cpus are not really impacted either.

                                  Thanks for sharing, I'll update the table tomorrow.

                                  gskgerG 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • gskgerG Offline
                                    gskger Top contributor @bleader
                                    last edited by gskger

                                    @bleader you are correct, the V1756B is a low power (45W TDP) desktop CPU of the AMD Ryzen embedded v1000 series based on the ZEN microarchitecture with 4 cores and 8 threads. It operates at a base freqeuncy of 3.25 GHz and a boost frequency of 3.6 GHz max. The HP T740 thin client is a capable low power, low noise computer for running XCP-ng in a homelab, but it's not a real match for serious AMD desktop or server CPUs.

                                    M 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • M Offline
                                      manilx @gskger
                                      last edited by manilx

                                      @gskger Returning to this:

                                      Our backups on our business deployment, 2 HPE, (,ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus v2,) with AMD EPYC 7543P 32-Core Processor connected via redundant 10G nic's and switched to 10G NAS (QNAP, Synology) for storage and backups we get backup speeds of 80-90MiB/s tops with NBP.
                                      ScreenShot 2024-04-10 at 10.53.59.png
                                      ScreenShot 2024-04-10 at 10.42.45.png

                                      On my Homelab with Protectli Mini PC connected via 10G also to 10G QNAP I get 250-300 MiB/s !!!!!!
                                      ScreenShot 2024-04-10 at 10.57.44.png
                                      ScreenShot 2024-04-10 at 10.42.57.png

                                      This really is a problem for us now since we started with XCPNG 1 yr ago. Slow backup/restore speeds are a hindrance in our backup strategy.

                                      Now that I switched my Homelab from Proxmox (using it for 3yrs) to XCPNG I stumbled upn this speed difference and it is incredible.

                                      I wonder if it is not also related to this issue with EPYC networking.

                                      P.S: I have opened a ticket BUT I wanted ti share this here also.

                                      florentF S 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                      • florentF Offline
                                        florent Vates 🪐 XO Team @manilx
                                        last edited by

                                        @manilx hi, I am working on the backup side, that is a very interesting finding. I have some question to rule out some hypothesis :

                                        What storage do you use on both side ? iscsi / nfs ?
                                        Is XO running on the master ?

                                        M 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • olivierlambertO Offline
                                          olivierlambert Vates 🪐 Co-Founder CEO
                                          last edited by

                                          @bleader do you remember if we also had slower network speed between a VM and the Dom0 or only between 2 regular guests?

                                          bleaderB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • S Offline
                                            Seneram @manilx
                                            last edited by

                                            @manilx @florent it would make sense since XOA vm for backups is after all an VM and should be impacted by VM network issues for epycs.

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