[lxc-devel] [Olsr-users] lxc network emulation

Markus Kittenberger Markus.Kittenberger at gmx.at
Sat Oct 22 09:12:18 UTC 2011


On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 12:01 AM, <clownix at clownix.net> wrote:

> In my machines there is also sshd and other things that are usually there :
>
hmm i do not expect ssh server to be ressource hungry

but a serial console is enough, imho
(or even nothing,.. (-;)

i had around 2-3MB ram usage per container (debian minimal rootfs) for a
simple system (just init, getty, rsyslog, olsrd)
and 1.5MB for containers with just olsrd running,.. (lxc-init, olsrd)

(those numbers are without additional olsrd/system RAM usage for
topology/routes)

so in both cases RAM (i had 16GB) was not my limit, (except for extremely
dense topologies,..)

(but having only 2 cpu cores, was the limit)

>
> [Clown1.1.1> ps -ef
> UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
> root         1     0  0 21:47 ?        00:00:00 init [2]
> root       253     1  0 21:47 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd -c4
> root       264     1  0 21:47 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/cron

running cron , is asking for troubles
(as it might start something simultaneous on all systems)

>

root       324     1  0 21:47 ?        00:00:00 dhclient -v -pf
> /var/run/dhclien
>

hmm who needs a dhcp cllient, when running ospf/olsrd?

except this, and that you are logged in (-;

your system looks nice && small aswell.

root       361     1  0 21:47 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
> root       373     1  0 21:48 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/olsrd -d 0
> root       376     1  0 21:48 console  00:00:00 /bin/login -f      console
> root       377   376  0 21:48 console  00:00:00 -bash
> root       380   361  0 21:48 ?        00:00:00 sshd: root at pts/0
> root       382   380  0 21:48 pts/0    00:00:00 -bash
> root       387   382  0 21:48 pts/0    00:00:00 ps -ef
> [Clown1.1.1>
>
> May-be this explains the difference, and also may-be more machines can be
> handled with olsr. I had a big problem with ospf because when the topology
> is big ospf eats up too much memory and cpu per machine, so I did not push
> the olsr protocol much further.
>
ok (-;

btw. i found that olsrds internal scheduler (of stable branch) uses too much
cpu aswell, especially in such setups.
so infact on my tegra2 setup, 75% of the cpuload, was introduced by the
schedulers.
(calculating the routes, parsing/generating messages, and so on, used only
20%)

btw my above numbers (250/2000 instances) are with olsrd 0.6.2 from stable
branch with default config.
with raising the PollRate, even more olsrd instances are possible on same
cpu.
furthermore next major releases of olsrd will have better scheduling, too.

>
> The goal of cloonix is to manage the networking and the
> creation/destruction of the machines, not really to setup a record of
> machines.
>
sure.

my inital idea was to evaluate if one can run/simulate a reasonable complex
mesh-network on a "smartphone"
e.g. 250 olsrd instances, 350 interfaces, ~2000 links.
on a tegra2 system (cortex a9, 2x 1ghz, 512MB RAM)

so yes, it was a bit like record hunting (on limited hardware,..)

and afterwards i just checked how it would scale on a real PC.

and as your numbers of instances where (normalized by cpu performance) only
around 1/15th of my setup,.
(which might indicate severe overhead somewhere in your setup)

i just had to say something (-;

per machine 2000 machines = 10 giga!
>
btw i ran ~ 2000 on a dual core (5Ghz) system,

a empty machine itself should need quite nothing
(if its a linux container and not really a (virtual) machine)

And also my file-systems are duplicated except for /bin /sbin /lib and
> /usr,

and this takes some hard disk, 2000 would be far too much.
>
(depends on the setup,..)

btw i ran my system on (nearly) complete readonly filesystems (-;
(i just had ~100KB harddisk usage per instance (-;)

or i just started a olsrd process inside a container (with its own network
stack),

which imho for many testcases is just enough, as olsrd has its plugins that
allow querying its state via network,..
and booting hundreds/thousands of systems (even if they aren`t RAM-hungry),
just takes too much time,.. (-;

Markus
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