Performance research

Written here are performance issues found.

Timing stats of live migration of a small container with 11 tasks is

• Total time ~3.5 seconds
• Frozen time ~3.0 seconds
  • Pre-dump stages ~0.5 seconds each
  • Restore time ~1.9 seconds
  • Images transfer time ~0.3 seconds

Below is the list of issues found

Dump

Surprisingly, but the mem-drain time is not the biggest. It's "only" ~0.02 seconds. There are places in code that take longer.

parse_smaps

Time spent in this routine is up to 0.2 seconds on dump. This one exploits /proc heavily. For a container with 11 tasks the syscall stats look like

   834 read
  1451 fstat
  1462 close
  1642 openat

while opens and stats happen on

   193 openat(4, "map-symlink", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
  1438 openat(4, "map-symlink", O_RDONLY) = 5
    11 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/$pid/map_files", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 4

Restore

Fork vs VMA restore

We restore task's mappings before it goes forking to handle COW. This effectively serializes forking.

Restoring VMAs

There are 4 stages in VMA restore. Relative times of each are below

• Reading images 1%
• Mapping huuge premap area << 1%
• (Re-)mapping sub-areas 73%
• Filling area with data 26%

The 3rd stage has two parts. With timings:

• Opening filemap fd 85%
• Maping vma 15%