Impact of Modern Virtualization Methods on Timing Precision and Performance of High-Speed Applications

Abstract

The presented work is a result of extended research and analysis on timing methods precision, their efficiency in different virtual environments and the impact of timing precision on the performance of high-speed networks applications. We investigated how timer hardware is shared among heavily CPU- and I/O-bound tasks on a virtualized OS as well as on bare OS. By replacing the invoked timing methods within a well-known application for estimation of available path bandwidth, we provide the analysis of their impact on estimation accuracy. We show that timer overhead and precision are crucial for high-performance network applications, and low-precision timing methods usage, e.g., the delays and overheads issued by virtualization result in the degradation of the virtual environment. Furthermore, in this paper, we provide confirmation that, by using the methods we intentionally developed for both precise timing operations and AvB estimation, it is possible to overcome the inefficiency of standard time-related operations and overhead that comes with the virtualization. The impacts of negative virtualization factors were investigated in five different environments to define the most optimal virtual environment for high-speed network applications.

Keywords

• virtualization
• cloud computing
• timestamps precision
• timekeeping
• networking
• QEMU
• KVM
• Virtual Box
• Xen
• VMware ESXi