[openstack-dev] Python overhead for rootwrap

Joe Gordon joe.gordon0 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 25 20:21:51 UTC 2013


Hi All,

We have recently hit some performance issues with nova-network.  It turns
out the root cause of this was we do roughly 20 rootwrapped shell commands,
many inside of global locks. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/oslo/+bug/1199433)

It turns out starting python itself, has a fairly significant overhead when
compared to the run time of many of the binary commands we execute.

For example:

$ time python -c "print 'test'"
test

real 0m0.023s
user 0m0.016s
sys 0m0.004s


$ time ip a
<...>

real 0m0.003s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s


While we have removed the extra overhead of using entry points, we are now
hitting the overhead of just shelling out to python.


While there are many possible ways to reduce this issue, such as reducing
the number of rootwrapped calls and making locks finer grain, I think its
worth exploring alternates to the current rootwrap model.

Any ideas?  I am sending this email out to get the discussion started.


best,
Joe Gordon
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20130725/6b8dda7b/attachment.html>


More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list