Re: performance of jailed processes

Robert Watson <rwatson_at_freebsd.org> writes:
> - DNS -- I know you mentioned it, but I'd check anyway.  Especially if
>   resolv.conf has bad DNS servers in it in the jails, etc.  You might try
>   writing a trivial gethostbyname() test app and timing it in and out of
>   the jail.  Also look at the reverse lookup done by the MySQL server.
>   The impact of the source IP address might be particularly interesting.

Packet traces already show that there is no delay between query and
reply, the reply just takes a long time to transmit.

> - It would be interesting to know if applications outside the jail bound
>   to various IP addresses see performance differences depending on the IP
>   used.  We have hashed IP address lookup, but there are some operations
>   in the stack that require walking the list of addresses, etc.  If the
>   non-jailed software always uses the first address because they're all in
>   the same subnet, that might conceivably make a difference.  Taking jail
>   out of the picture in some basic micro-benchmarks might help here also. 

Non-jailed software always uses the first IP address, which is in its
own subnet.  The jails draw from a pool of ~1000 IP addresses on the
same interface, but in a different subnet.  The jail I've been testing
in is about a quarter of the way down the list.

> Can you identify any micro-benchmarks rather than macro-benchmarks that
> reflect a significant difference?

haven't had much luck with that...  fetch, for instance, doesn't seem
to suffer, but with mysql the difference is dramatic:

(outside jail)
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

(inside jail)
1 row in set (13.20 sec)

note that 13 seconds is far too short for a DNS issue, and that the
time reported is measured *after* login (i.e. after any DNS lookup)

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des_at_des.no