xen-netfront: always keep the Rx ring full of requests
A full Rx ring only requires 1 MiB of memory. This is not enough
memory that it is useful to dynamically scale the number of Rx
requests in the ring based on traffic rates, because:
a) Even the full 1 MiB is a tiny fraction of a typically modern Linux
VM (for example, the AWS micro instance still has 1 GiB of memory).
b) Netfront would have used up to 1 MiB already even with moderate
data rates (there was no adjustment of target based on memory
pressure).
c) Small VMs are going to typically have one VCPU and hence only one
queue.
Keeping the ring full of Rx requests handles bursty traffic better
than trying to converge on an optimal number of requests to keep
filled.
On a 4 core host, an iperf -P 64 -t 60 run from dom0 to a 4 VCPU guest
improved from 5.1 Gbit/s to 5.6 Gbit/s. Gains with more bursty
traffic are expected to be higher.
Signed-off-by: David Vrabel <david.vrabel@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
1 file changed