oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/propolis

Sysbench memory performance substantially worse on older Linux distros

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
270
Forks
42
Avg merge
4d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

The following sysbench command with different parameters was executed on a 4 vcpu / 16 GiB VM on AWS and Oxide rack2 instances on various linux distros:

sysbench memory --memory-oper=$oper --memory-block-size=$blksize --memory-scope=$scope --memory-total-size=100G --threads=4 --time=30 run

The results are documented here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18lUU7RIqjxklMOo5YmvwwFYXto2CGOXBz5b5bjuZxRU/edit#gid=2087813628

As highlighted in column P of the sysbench tab, the events per second are much lower on ubuntu 20.04 (focal) whereas ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) is on par or better on Oxide. For comparison, I also ran the same tests on debian 11 on Oxide and the results are consistent with those on jammy.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the listed sysbench memory command on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 11 using the AWS or Oxide environments described. Compare events per second with the sysbench spreadsheet, then determine whether the distro-dependent performance difference has an actionable cause and a measurable resolution.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
aws, linux
Domain
cloud, operating-systems, performance
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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