Re: [Xen-API] Xen Management API draft

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 09:24:40AM +0100, Ian Pratt wrote:
> > Is it realistic to use XML-RPC for tasks such as resource monitoring?
> > Seems like there should be an optional, lower-latency, lighter-weight
> > mechanism to retrieve things such as host_cpu.utilisation,
> > VBD.IO_bandwidth/incoming_kbs, etc.  
> 
> The whole stats reporting interface certainly needs more thought.
> 
> However, I think it definitely should still use the xml-rpc interface,

definitely ? because that's really where it should be done, or just because
you don't want any direct hypervisor calls ? A direct hypervisor call
don't even force a dom0 context switch to implement, in contrast the RPC
is, very very expensive.

> we just need to 'cook' the raw data into something more directly useful
> within xend so that there's no need to do high-rate polling on the API.
> This might involve using something like rrdtool to generate averages
> over different time scales etc.

  I don't think trying to add more feature into xend is really a good
way to solve the real problem, in my opinion the hyprvisor calls for
getting performance data should be considered at least as standard as
any xend RPC api. I understand that we should avoid them for any call
with side effect, but for monitoring, I don't see how you will be able
to offer a flexible alternative. You don't need very high rate polling
to just eat all CPU when going though RPC and Xend as our experiments
have shown. In libvirt if I don't use the hypervisor calls a few refresh
per second of the state of the hypervisor takes a very significant fraction
of the overall CPU (for example if you use the fedora virtualization applet
for monitoring as an non-root user).

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat http://redhat.com/
veillard@xxxxxxxxxx  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/

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