[Haifux] [HAIFUX LECTURE] VSwapper, a guest-agnostic memory swapper for virtual environments -- Nadav Amit

[Eli Billauer]

On Monday, April 28th at 18:30, Haifux will gather to hear a talk by 
Nadav Amit:

    VSwapper, a guest-agnostic memory swapper for virtual environments

Abstract

The number of guest virtual machines that can be consolidated on one 
physical host is typically limited by the memory size, motivating memory 
overcommitment. Guests are given a choice to either install a "balloon" 
driver to coordinate the overcommitment activity, or to experience 
degraded performance due to uncooperative swapping. Ballooning, however, 
is not a complete solution, as hosts must still fall back on 
uncooperative swapping in various circumstances. Additionally, 
ballooning takes time to accommodate change, and so guests might 
experience degraded performance under changing conditions.

Our goal is to improve the performance of hosts when they fall back on 
uncooperative swapping and/or operate under changing load conditions. We 
carefully isolate and characterize the causes for the associated poor 
performance, which include various types of superfluous swap operations, 
decayed swap file sequentiality, and ineffective prefetch decisions upon 
page faults. We address these problems by implementing VSwapper, a 
guest-agnostic memory swapper for virtual environments that allows 
efficient, uncooperative overcommitment. With inactive ballooning, 
VSwapper yields up to an order of magnitude performance improvement. 
Combined with ballooning, VSwapper can achieve up to double the 
performance under changing load conditions.

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We meet in Taub building, room 6. For instructions see:
http://www.haifux.org/where.html

Attendance is free, and you are all invited!

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Future lectures:

There are no scheduled lectures.


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We are always interested in hearing your talks and ideas. If you wish to 
give a talk, hold a discussion, or just plan some event haifux might be 
interested in, please contact us at webmaster at haifux.org

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Web: http://www.billauer.co.il