• Florian Westphal's avatar
    xfrm: policy: remove pcpu policy cache · e4db5b61
    Florian Westphal authored
    Kristian Evensen says:
      In a project I am involved in, we are running ipsec (Strongswan) on
      different mt7621-based routers. Each router is configured as an
      initiator and has around ~30 tunnels to different responders (running
      on misc. devices). Before the flow cache was removed (kernel 4.9), we
      got a combined throughput of around 70Mbit/s for all tunnels on one
      router. However, we recently switched to kernel 4.14 (4.14.48), and
      the total throughput is somewhere around 57Mbit/s (best-case). I.e., a
      drop of around 20%. Reverting the flow cache removal restores, as
      expected, performance levels to that of kernel 4.9.
    
    When pcpu xdst exists, it has to be validated first before it can be
    used.
    
    A negative hit thus increases cost vs. no-cache.
    
    As number of tunnels increases, hit rate decreases so this pcpu caching
    isn't a viable strategy.
    
    Furthermore, the xdst cache also needs to run with BH off, so when
    removing this the bh disable/enable pairs can be removed too.
    
    Kristian tested a 4.14.y backport of this change and reported
    increased performance:
    
      In our tests, the throughput reduction has been reduced from around -20%
      to -5%. We also see that the overall throughput is independent of the
      number of tunnels, while before the throughput was reduced as the number
      of tunnels increased.
    Reported-by: default avatarKristian Evensen <kristian.evensen@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarFlorian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSteffen Klassert <steffen.klassert@secunet.com>
    e4db5b61
xfrm_device.c 7.37 KB