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    Epyc VM to VM networking slow

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Compute
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    • bleaderB Offline
      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 Offline
          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 Offline
                              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 Offline
                                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.

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

                                            Not necessarily. XOA is a VM, but it's communicating with the Dom0, which is a VM indeed, but not a regular one. Could have been interesting to check if XOA VM is not sitting on the same host it's doing a backup, to see the result.

                                            M S 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
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