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VAMNET - performance



One of the incredible results of the VAM project is the fact that the Amoeba emulation layer AMUNIX with the user process implementation of the protocol stack FLIP and the virtual machine approach have only a slightly decreased performance compared with the native VX-Kernel and Amoeba implementation. The following tables gives an impression of the performance and capabilities of the native VX-Kernel system, the AMUNIX and the VAM on the top of AMUNIX system.

The main indicator for the performance of a distributed operating system is the performance of the messaging system, that means the data transfer rate and latency of messages without content (only the message header is transferred).



(Tab. 1) RPC Test: remote with native VX-Amoeba kernel
Machine configuration Transfer direction Transfer rate Latency
1:AMD-Duron 650 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet 1 => 2 11,2 MBytes/s 130 us
2:Celeron 700 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet 2 => 1 10,6 MBytes/s 136 us



(Tab. 2) RPC Test: remote with native VX-Amoeba kernel
Machine configuration Transfer direction Transfer rate Latency
1:AMD-Duron 650 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet 1 => 2 10,5 MBytes/s 170 us
2:Cyrix 100 MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet 2 => 1 9,54 MBytes/s 170 us



(Tab. 3) RPC Test: remote with native VX-Kernel and AMUNIX
Machine configuration Transfer direction Transfer rate Latency
1:AMD-Duron 650 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet, VX-Kernel 1 => 2 8,7 MBytes/s 270 us
2:Celeron 700 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet, FreeBSD + AMUNIX 2 => 1 9,1 MBytes/s 260 us



(Tab. 4) RPC Test: remote with VX-Kernl and AMUNIX and VAM
Machine configuration Transfer direction Transfer rate Latency
1:AMD-Duron 650 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet, VX-Kernel 1 => 2 8,7 MBytes/s 300 us
2:Celeron 700 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 3COM905 100MBit/s Ethernet, FreeBSD + AMUNIX + VAM 2 => 1 8,7 MBytes/s 300 us

The above measurements are example measurements with an accuracy of about < pm>10%. Of course, table 1 shows that the transfer performance of a RPC message transfer from one to another machine reaches it's maximal value. Not only compared with the following AMUNIX and VAM system, also compared with the maximal possible physical transfer rate of 100MBit/s ethernet: 11,9 MBytes/s. This result shows the optiomal adaption of the FLIP protocol stack and the underlying ethernet device drivers to this network system. Table 2 shows results with a different machine 2: a very old Pentium like CPU (Cyrix MMX) with only 100 MHZ core frequency. The VX-Kernel yields to good performance results downto i486 CPU machines.

Using the AMUNIX layer communicating with a native VX-Kernel (Table 3), only a slight decrease in performance and latency can be observed. The transfer rates decreases about 20%, and the latency increased about 100%. With additonal VAM (Table 4), there is no significant difference. This result shows the suitability of ML programming and virtual machine concepts for client-server implementations.

The RPC message passing is not only used for the remote case, but for the local case, too. The following table shows results for the various environments.



(Tab. 5) RPC Test: local case
Machine configuration Transfer direction Transfer rate Latency
1:AMD-Duron 650 MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, VX-Kernel 1 => 1 136 MBytes/s 12 us
1:Celeron 700 MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, FreeBSD < oplus>AMUNIX 1 => 1 26 MBytes/s 275 us
1:Celeron 700 MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, FreeBSD + AMUNIX + VAM 1 => 1 22,4 MBytes/s 400 us

No surprise the native VX-kernel is the winner. But the AMUNIX and VAM system have sufficient transfer rates and latency times to implement efficient local RPC communication.

(*) us = micro seconds



Generated by MANDoc (C) 2005 BSSLAB Dr. Stefan Bosse
Revision 1113489155

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