[lxc-users] Speeding up containers startup

[Benoit Lourdelet]

Hello,

I am using the host interfaces directly for my actual container :

E.g.:

lxc.network.type = phys

lxc.network.flags = up

lxc.network.link = eth10.1.1

lxc.network.name = eth0

lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:50:56:b8:01:00

I am running either 1,4 or 32 hyper threaded cores per container without notable difference, at least in terms of startup time and CPU utilization.

Regards

Benoit

From: Ranjib Dey <dey.ranjib at gmail.com<mailto:dey.ranjib at gmail.com>>
Reply-To: "lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org<mailto:lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org>" <lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org<mailto:lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org>>
Date: Friday, 24 January 2014 10:25
To: "lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org<mailto:lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org>" <lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org<mailto:lxc-users at lists.linuxcontainers.org>>
Subject: Re: [lxc-users] Speeding up containers startup

can you use the host network interface directly? i have not done it, but i know its possible. how many processes are running inside each container? if its very less, i think low cpu footprint is expected ..


On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:55 AM, Benoit Lourdelet <blourdel at juniper.net<mailto:blourdel at juniper.net>> wrote:
Hello,

I am running thousands of containers  (1.0.0 beta2 kernel 3.11.9)  - each with one physical interface-
 and suffering from relatively slow startup rate : it takes 30 minutes to start 5000 containers.

During the startup period,  the CPU is not busy (below 20%). There is no disk involved as I run on a RAM disk.

I know that transferring interfaces to a namespace takes time.

The following script takes 24 minutes on the same platform :


date

for i in $(seq 1 5000)

 do

ip netns add sp$i

ip link add a$i type veth peer name b$i

ip link set a$i netns sp$i

done

Date


Starting 5000 containers without interface (only lo0) takes 11 minutes. So adding 24 to 11 is approximatively 30 minutes.

Is there a way to start the containers without interface  at all and add the interfaces to the containers in a  bulk fashion to speed up the processes ?

More generally is there a reason why container creation is not eating all the CPU ? The container creation processes takes between 10 or 20% of the host core CPU and no more.
Taking in account that no disk is involved as I run on a RAM disk.

Thanks

Benoit

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