Performance Analyzing and Predicting of Network I/O in Xen System

Abstract

The network I/O operations of a guest domain spend Domain0's processor resource as well as its own processor resource. If no control is placed on the network I/O operations of guest domains, Xen system will likely overload when executing network I/O-intensive workload. To resolve this problem, the allowable network I/O request number of Xen system should be firstly figured out. This paper illuminated the characteristic of Xen system in handling the network I/O operations of guest domains with two experimental results, and established several performance analyzing and predicting models by studying the network I/O procedure and the processor resource consumption distribution of Xen system. These models can compute the allowable number of guest domains with fixed network I/O request number or the allowable network I/O request number of each guest domain based on all idle processor resource of Xen system, and prevent Xen system from overloading. Finally, the applicability of these models is preliminarily analyzed.