Re: [vserver] Guest hourly/daily/... cron job parallel execution

From: Bendtsen, Jon <Jon.Bendtsen_at_laerdal.dk>
Date: Thu 17 Jan 2013 - 10:35:43 GMT
Message-ID: <0323272F9AEDC74392AAC35180F56F6A53B644@NOSRV220.laerdal.global>

On 17/01/2013, at 11.05, Fiedler Roman <Roman.Fiedler@ait.ac.at> wrote:

>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>> Von: Bendtsen, Jon [mailto:Jon.Bendtsen@laerdal.dk]
>>
>> On 17/01/2013, at 10.07, Fiedler Roman <Roman.Fiedler@ait.ac.at>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>>>> Von: Bendtsen, Jon [mailto:Jon.Bendtsen@laerdal.dk]
>>>>
>>>> On 17/01/2013, at 09.43, Fiedler Roman <Roman.Fiedler@ait.ac.at>
>> wrote:

[cuuuuuut]

>> Or maybe just pick some random time, sort of what old ethernet did when
>> there is a collision because 2 or more computers tried to transmit data at the
>> same time.
>
> Yes. Or use the context-ID modulo something.

good idea

[cuuuuuut]

>> I see your point. If so maybe we should split up daily/weekly/hourly cronjobs
>> even further, such that all the same programs which are hard linked together
>> can use the same cache and ram for instructions. But running locate to update
>> the database might not be a good choice to all run at the same time.
>
> I would expect, that caching of the application code itself is not the main performance boost. It is more about getting rid of the bottle-necks. As you noted, too many locate-updates in parallel will kill disk performance. But also loosing the usual disk-cache benefit might be problematic. If e.g. just a few databases run a job, the relevant db-content from disk is likely the end up completely in OS RAM cache. All disk-reads from db will return immediately. When too many DBs execute in parallel, disk content of one process will be put in cache, eliminating pages soon need again by another job again.

This is not really any different from running many other kinds of virtual machines in parallel. Your storage system needs to perform.

>> Maybe we need kind of scheduler in the kernel that notices which processes
>> in the different guests are hard linked and then prioritizing running those?
>>
>> Maybe we need some new kind of scheduler system that is made with
>> virtualization in mind, such that it adjusts to when there is a low load and then
>> tries to run the maintenance scripts, meaning that sometimes scripts are run
>> with only 20 hours between them, other times it might be 36 hours.
>
> In my opinion, such an intelligent/learning scheduler would allow significance increase in execution performance, but looking of the simplicity of current cron, I think, that such a program is years away, if even written ever.

probably. But I can imagine other ways to do it. I already use the at system for some tasks. Like my backup scripts. If the load is too high or the system is other wise not ready, I have my backup scripts call 'at now + 1 hour' to run the script itself 1 hour later. If it is still not ready, I call +2 hours, +4 and finally +8 hours.

But it all hinges on the guest knowing the over all system load of the virtualization host, just like a process in a normal stand alone system can see the system load. Maybe we need a new field in the load data? Or a new syscall to give those data?

[cuuuuut]

>> I am not starting cron daemon with nice. I put nice in side the crontab file, like
>> these examples:
>>
>> 37 0 * * * root nice -n 15
>> /usr/local/sbin/AD_integration/find_disabled_users_from_AD_in_groups.sh
>> 0,15,30,45 * * * * root nice -n 5
>> /usr/local/sbin/AD_integration/merge_AD_groups_with_unix.sh
>
> Ah I see.
>
> My current solution is:
> * Check for each guest, if cron scheduler is installed inside
> * Check if guest cron would run hourly/daily by himself, if yes let him do it. A misconfigured/malicious guest can always run any process at any time, this has to be addressed via other means
> * If guest cron is installed, cron.daily/hourly ... directories exist but guest scheduler does NOT run those jobs from etc/crontab (cooperative guest) by itself, then start those via vserver-exec
> * Make sure to run only a given number of those guest processes in parallel
>
> So all you need to do is to install cron in guest but remove run-scripts directives for hourly/daily from /etc/crontab to opt in.

Yes, that is a method too, but I would not really like that outsiders, like hosting providers ran tasks inside my guest, at least not without my beforehand knowledge. I guess it works if one administrates both the host and the guests.

JonB
Received on Thu Jan 17 10:36:01 2013

[Next/Previous Months] [Main vserver Project Homepage] [Howto Subscribe/Unsubscribe] [Paul Sladen's vserver stuff]
Generated on Thu 17 Jan 2013 - 10:36:01 GMT by hypermail 2.1.8